


Fabula

by Rotpeach



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Codes & Ciphers, Dark, Dubious Consent, Horror, Manipulation, Other, Post-Undertale Pacifist Route, Reader-Insert, Science Fiction, Surreal, Tentacle Dick, Time Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-10-04
Packaged: 2018-12-17 15:34:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11854527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rotpeach/pseuds/Rotpeach
Summary: You've been missing for five years when you're found deep in the Underground. People always want to know what you were doing down there. You wish you knew.Your search for answers will lead you to places no one is meant to see to find a man who does not exist.





	1. Image Rehearsal Therapy

**Author's Note:**

> this is a story about you, but it is intended for mature audiences. it contains disturbing themes and sexually explicit content. it will get darker (yet darker) the further you go. tags will be updated as chapters are added. remember to have fun.

You want to start from the beginning. Really, you do. You wish you could. You wish this, right here, was the beginning.

You want to start from there and work your way forward but it’s all melting clocks and slowed metronomes and space expanding and contracting and twisting at a rate you can’t comprehend when you think back on it now, and you can’t even remember what direction you came from or what happened before.

Time is worthless to you now. Seconds and minutes and hours are meaningless. You want to start from the beginning, but you can’t seem to find it.

Maybe it starts at the mountain. The important parts, anyway, the parts you need and the parts you’re missing. It starts there, when you first notice that time isn’t working and something is very wrong and reality slips through your fingers faster than you can hold onto it or it can hold onto you.

Or maybe it starts in 1637. That’s when Pierre de Fermat makes a note in the margins of _Arithmetica_ that he’d conceived of a marvelous theorem too incredible to be written in the space provided.

You don’t know if that was before the mountain. It doesn’t matter anymore. But you do know that it took three hundred years for anyone to come close to solving it, and that even then, in 1994, the techniques used to solve it were ones that hadn’t been developed until after Fermat’s death. And that, you thought, had to mean something. That, in itself, was a beginning all its own.

You want to start from the beginning. You want to tell a story about yourself. But yours is not a story that can be told easily, nor in order, not when there is no order. Recalling your experience in its entirety is a painful and frightening process but you feel you have no choice.

You have come this far.

You can’t remember the way back anymore.

You fear there never was one.

*

Late summer rain clouds darken the sky and choke the air with a stifling humidity, plastering stray strands of hair to your face. You hold your umbrella in one hand and your phone in the other, checking the time, because you think it’s running backwards, that the 4 just ticked back to a 3, but maybe you imagined it.

Puddles gathering in the dips and cracks in the sidewalk splatter beneath the boots of two children, human and monster, their striped shirts dark and heavy with rainwater. They both pause as you pass by to avoid splashing you and you offer an appreciative smile. But the monster, barely up to your chest with bony ridges along the back of their head and a distinct lack of arms, catches your eye and stares at you curiously.

“Hey!” they call after you. “Wait, are you famous or something? I’ve definitely seen your face before.”

You don’t stop walking and you don’t turn around, muttering a quick, “No,” in response.

“No, hold on, I remember,” the monster goes on as if they didn’t hear you, and you hear the patter of little, hurried footsteps splashing behind you as they both rush to catch up to you. “You were in the newspaper, like, on the front page! And on TV! You were in the Underground!”

It’s early enough that the morning work rush hasn’t started quite yet, leaving the streets quiet. The only sound as you walk is the soft murmur of falling rain and the extra pair of footsteps squishing along the sidewalk and echoing your own. “You should go inside,” you tell the children. “You’ll get sick if you play in the rain like this.”

The monster shakes their head, insisting, “Nah, we won’t get sick! We had rain in the Underground, too, but it wasn’t the same as it is up here. Surface rain is awesome!”

The human child hasn’t said a word, though nods in agreement. The monster speaks more than enough for the both of them, anyway, asking, “So, where are you going?”

“It’s dangerous to follow strangers around,” you say sternly, though you’re surprised when you don’t get an answer back. You glance over your shoulder to see if they’ve finally grown bored of following you, but find the human child signing something to their friend.

The monster looks crestfallen, chin tucked into their chest. “Oh. Are you annoyed that we’re following you? Sorry”

You feel a twinge of guilt at their pitiful tone and slow your pace, allowing them to catch up to you. Both of the children cram themselves at your sides beneath the umbrella and you wince at their cold, waterlogged shirts dampening your clothes. “No, you’re not annoying me,” you tell them, softening your tone. “But you really should be more careful around strangers.”

The monster child grins. “Aw, but you’re not dangerous. I can tell just by looking, and I know you wouldn’t hurt a kid.”

“Really?”

“Yep! So where are we going?”

You find their enthusiasm contagious and smile, shaking your head. “Well, I don’t know where you’re going, but I’ve got a doctor’s appointment. Boring, grown-up stuff. You wouldn’t like it.”

“Ohhhhhh,” the monster child says. You don’t look down but you hear the frown in their voice. “Yeah, that sounds boring.” Soon, they’ve fallen out of step with you and have scurried away to a newer, larger puddle somewhere behind you. You laugh to yourself; you should’ve said that to begin with.

The South Ebott University hospital looms into view, gently sloping roofs and rounded walls, modern architecture casting a stiff silhouette on the gray sky. You walk right past it for the small brick office building a block further, where a nondescript sign over the window reads, “Psychiatric Associates of South Ebott,” and you look over your shoulder to see if anyone watches you go in.

*

It begins, for you, at the mountain. Maybe that’s true enough.

It begins there, in subterranean passageways where the people had forgotten both dawn and day yet kept their dreams of the stars, where so many words, spoken and unspoken, echoed deep in the earth carried by flowers glowing in the dark. It begins there and stretches on infinitely beyond the limits of physics and imagination, into the abyss where time dies and terrible eternity is born, and it does not end because there is no end.

He told you that and you believe him. He would know.

*

“It was a little different last night.”

Dr. Schaffer’s office is always dark with a strange, herbal scent you can’t name, lit only by a pair of lamps against the wall. He sits in the corner with a notepad while you lean back into the sofa and let your eyes slide shut. “Different how?” he asks. Every week, you tell him about dreams and nightmares, hypnagogic phantom sensations. He assures you they’re only that, and you work hard to believe him.

“It lasted a lot longer.”

He nods. “Start from the beginning,” he advises you, and you swallow a lump of fear in your throat. That’s what everyone wants from you, start from the beginning and finish at the end, but it isn’t that simple. Your dreams blur into reality so neatly that you aren’t sure where they start, and the end is so abrupt that you feel it can’t really be over. The oppressively loud ticking of the antique wall clock hanging over your head makes you nervous.

“It was the same at first,” you explain, “the static, the heat, the dripping. But then, I felt it...I felt it touch me.”

(That’s how it always is now.

You lay awake at night in the haze between waking and sleep, eyelids fluttering, mind wandering. And then you hear a noise, a burst of static, like the TV coming on downstairs and hovering between recognizable channels, a dull, humming murmur. But after the noise comes the heat, more than rain storm humidity, more than having too many blankets in the summer, like you’re in the center of the earth and molten rock is swirling and melting all around you, sweltering, heat haze shimmering. You start to sweat and struggle to breathe.

And then the dripping starts, distant at first, muffled by the carpet, but it comes closer. The heat begins to fade. A sudden, wet sensation of something splattering on the sheets, and somehow, it looks even darker than the rest of the room. Sometimes it hits your arm or your face and it sounds like water and it looks like ink but it moves like tar and it feels like it wants something from you.

You keep your eyes squeezed shut for this part. You don’t want to risk looking around. Even when you feel cold breath tickling your lips and hear a warped sigh, goosebumps prickling along your skin, you keep them closed and you wait for it to be over.)

“It touched you?” Dr. Schaffer asks.

“It was warmer than I expected,” you say absently. “It seemed soft, like liquid. I mean, it sounds that way. It drips. But he was so warm. Almost pleasantly so.”

“He?”

You stop. Open your eyes. “What?”

“You said he. He was warm?”

“Sorry, I misspoke.”

(You didn’t. You know it’s a he. You know him, somewhere deep down, under the rubble of a fractured psyche.)

Dr. Schaffer asks, “That’s new, isn’t it? These hallucinations have been visual and auditory, but not tactile.”

You take a deep breath. “Yeah. I’m not sure why.”

“Alright. Do you want to walk me through your process for tonight, or are you feeling pretty confident?”

“No, ( _it doesn’t work it has never worked he won’t let it work_ ) I feel fairly confident.”

“That’s good.” Dr. Schaffer sets his notepad down and glances at you. “You know, though, if you ever feel you’d rather go in a different direction with your therapy, we can certainly do that. IRT is useful in the short term, but recurring nightmares are often indicative of your body trying to tell you something, in a sense. Trying to rework them into more palatable dreams could mean you’re overlooking something.”

You force a smile. “I’d rather focus on this for now. One thing at a time, you know.”

“Of course. Is there anything else you want to talk about today?”

(The texts. You need to tell him about the texts. You need to tell him, tell somebody, tell anybody, you need to tell them, you _need_ )

You stare at the carpet. The ticking of the wall clock seems louder now, almost ominous. It measures time so arrogantly, mocking you, taunting you, _“This is the way things are_ ,” but you know it’s wrong, it’s all wrong.

If you listen carefully, it almost sounds like dripping.

“No,” you say, “that’s all.”

You’re haunted by the noise, the incessant ticking-dripping all the way down the hall. Only when you go back outside, letting the rain soak through everything you’re wearing and fill your shoes and land heavy on your lashes, fill you with the chaotic patter of a million raindrops to drown out every other noise, does it finally become too distant to hear any longer.

*

When they found you, you were half-starved and mad, the soles of your feet dotted with old scabs, clutching a worn backpack to your chest with nothing but stale, half-eaten monster candy and your cell phone inside.

You were afraid when they reached for you, and though you were too weak to struggle, you screamed until you lost your voice and the only sounds that left your throat were hoarse rattles that tried to be words. They told you that you would be alright, that they weren’t going to hurt you, that you were going home, but you didn’t relax until you were halfway to the surface. That’s when you passed out in their arms.

That’s what you were told in the hospital, shortly after you woke to the sight of several faces looming over you, brows furrowed with worry and eyes filling with tears. It took time for you to recognize them as fellow humans—as your parents. Your mother was too choked up to speak so your father explained that a team of geologists happened across you while spelunking for rare cave formations in the tunnels beneath Mt. Ebott.

This immediately struck you as strange, because you vaguely recalled Mt. Ebott and the caverns around it being strictly off-limits to anyone, the national park boundaries clearly marked by an iron fence. You said as much, which is when your father broke your gaze.

“It was off limits,” he told you, “but that was before the barrier fell.”

And the word _barrier_ resonated with something deep inside of you, something half-buried and long forgotten. On the surface, you knew what he was talking about; the barrier put in place centuries ago, erected by a magic humanity no longer possessed to seal the monsters below ground. But there was something else, too, something more to it, and it was on the tip of your tongue if you could only remember how to pronounce it.

“The barrier fell?” you asked, and you could barely make out your own words with the hoarseness of your voice. You winced, gently touching your fingertips to your throat. Your mother called a nurse for water, but grows impatient and goes looking for some herself.

(Your father whispers, once she leaves, “They told us you screamed. You tried to run deeper into the caverns and they were afraid they would lose you. You were confused and scared. You tried to fight them.”)

“I don’t understand,” you said. “When did the barrier fall? Just a few days ago?”

Your father shook his head. “No. It’s been two years.”

Two years seemed impossible. You would’ve heard about it, would’ve seen it on the news or read about it online. Everyone would have been talking about it on campus. It couldn’t have happened so quietly. You had trouble remembering anything that had happened between the last time you went to class and when you woke up in the hospital.

“Wait, but,” and suddenly it was hard to get any words out, because the more you pulled yourself out of the threshold between consciousness and unconsciousness, the more you realized something wasn’t right, something was wrong, _everything_ was wrong, and your thoughts started to race. You struggled to sit upright. “Wait, you said...I was in the caves? I was down there?”

Your father nodded slowly.

“When did I go?” you asked. “I don’t—I don’t remember anything. Just that I went to class, what, yesterday? And then….”

Your mother started to tremble, the paper cup slipping from her fingers, water splashing on the bedside table. Dripping on the tile floor, a steady, _plip-plip-plip_ that made your heart race for a reason you couldn’t recall. Your father put a hand on your shoulder. You looked between them helplessly. “I don’t understand,” you said.

Your father inhaled deeply and took a long time to answer. “You’ve been gone for five years.”

*

That was a beginning of sorts. That was a week ago, you think. As you walk back home, passersby giving you a wide berth with your clothes heavy with rainwater, droplets running down your face, you count off the days on your fingers, and yes, it adds up to seven.

Someone, someone told you that seven is special because every number is special, because if you look closely enough you can find significance in each of them.

“Doesn’t that take away from how special they are, if they’re all special?” you think you asked, and this someone must have chuckled in great amusement and said,

“Is that how it works? That seems like a disappointing way to look at the world. Why can’t all things be special?”

But you insisted, “It doesn’t matter, does it? If we’re giving them meaning, then there’s no meaning inherent to them. In that case, none of them are special.”

You think he disagreed. You think he did, but you can’t be certain. You might have dreamed this conversation, as well.

The door is unlocked for you. Your mother’s smile is strained as she looks at the sorry state you’re in. “Honey, I thought you took an umbrella.”

“I did,” you say. You don’t know where it went, but it’s gone now, ripped from your hands perhaps by a stray breeze or maybe you just dropped it. It doesn’t matter what happened but _when_ , and you can’t remember that, either.

“Go take a shower,” she urges, pushing you towards the stairs. “Change out of those damp clothes, at least.”

You nod, but out of the corner of your eye, you catch a glimpse of the newspaper lying on the counter where she’d been waiting for you. Below a bold headline reading, “Missing South Ebott University Student Found Alive After Five Years,” your face is there on the front page spread, a smiling portrait cropped from a family vacation photo taken a year ago.

(“Six years ago,” your father corrected with a hint of amusement. That conversation happened five days ago, you think. Yes, when you count, it adds up to five. Numbers have become a problem since you came back, dates and times swallowed whole by the five year void of your memory, but you do your best. He’s taking it better than your mother. You know they’re both happy, though perhaps shocked, that you came back at all.)

You don’t shower but you do change, and then you go to the spare bedroom in your parents’ house, a space that had been yours when you were a child and promptly redecorated when you started rooming with a friend while in undergrad at South Ebott University. Ironically, it’s yours again. Your clothes and your textbooks and everything else you’d left behind after suddenly vanishing all made their way back here, retrieved by your parents who believed their only child had died.

You grab a book on magico-algebra problem solving from the shelf, a thousand page monstrosity that was required reading for your major. As you open the front cover, your phone vibrates in your pocket. You’re reluctant to check it, but you slowly set the book down.

(You stood here, in this exact same spot in your room in front of your bookshelf, many years ago when you were a senior in high school, clutching a letter in your hands from South Ebott University, and your parents stood in the doorway looking at you expectantly.

And then, just a few days ago, you stood here again, and there was a similar feeling, the nervous but excited smiles of your parents and the hopeful shine in their eyes a few hours after you’d been discharged from the hospital. That was different, of course, because there had been no letter and no easy answer. Everything was the same but completely different.

They were waiting for you to relax, for a smile to appear on your face and the exhausted fog to clear from your eyes, but it never did. Something was off. Something was wrong. You didn’t know what, but you didn’t feel comfortable. The silence in the room loomed heavily over the three of you, breathing down your necks, and you couldn’t bring yourself to say anything. Your mother tried to smile but she started to cry instead.

She blamed herself—she’d wondered if you’d run away at first, if she’d scolded you for texting at the dinner table too many times or if you held a grudge for being grounded back in high school at some point. You told her that wasn’t it, but you couldn’t give her another reason for vanishing. You couldn’t remember. You all had to come to terms with that. You had to tell yourself you would move on and leave your lost time behind.

But the lost time is not ready to let go of you.)

The preview message on your phone’s lock screen is distorted, the sender’s number a string of digits that extends beyond the limits of the screen, your phone case cutting through the middle of a 5. When you open the message, you find

**TS VS QA RB MN YK PO FC MN HQ MT MR FA KH BF EQ MR GF BH UH HO FP MX VI FG TS VS OG IK HL NE FD MX KH TB VH MI YK VS QZ**

You don’t know what it means (you tell yourself you don’t; sometimes you think you do) any more than you know what the previous ones mean, all two-thousand and seven of them, text messages you’ve received—sometimes in bulk and sometimes alone—since you’ve been above ground, and you aren’t sure you want to know. Whenever you get them, you can feel someone else in the room with you, can hear them breathing and see their shadow fall across you.

No one is there. You know that. You glance back over your shoulder just to make sure, but the pinpricks of fear down your back won’t stop. The anxious, paranoid part of your mind tells you that they just moved out of your line of sight, that you would’ve seen them if you’d only turned around more quickly, but you try to calm your rapidly beating heart. It’s a side-effect, probably, from being down there for so long. Direct magic exposure is known to adversely affect human technology if proper modifications aren’t made. Your phone hasn’t worked right since you woke up, and you aren’t surprised since it spent five years in the Underground with you.

Something inside of you is afraid to tell anyone about it. You feel like you’re acting on advice, trying to remember something somebody told you a while ago, something you think you hear whispered late at night when your parents are asleep down the hall and you’re alone, eyes wrenched shut and feel him breathing and hear him dripping somewhere in the static, making something like words, something that sounds like a warning,

_“No one else is going to understand.”_

So you put your phone back down and pick the book up again, and you throw yourself into the words and equations. You can lose yourself so easily like this, you can lose so much time that you forget about time altogether, and that almost makes you feel like everything is okay.

*

“It may seem little more than a wonderful accident,” you think someone said to you once, maybe just in a dream, “but I do believe that the 1994 proof could have been legitimate.”

You had insisted once again that you weren’t sure about that. “But Fermat couldn’t have known…”

“Couldn’t he have? Three hundred years need not be a barrier at all if one knows where to look or listen.”

You feel, again, as though something is wrong, but you don’t know what. You know so little about the world you live in. You don’t know what exists and what doesn’t.

You want to remember how you were in the Underground for five years if the barrier has only been gone for two. You want to know what’s wrong, what’s missing, if you went in search of it or if you lost it while you were down there. You want it back.

You want to start from the beginning, but you will never, ever find it.


	2. Algebra in Wonderland

The noise is haunting—

(scratching-scraping-fan-whirring-processor-stuttering, filtered through backmask and white noise, transmitted through the void and straight into your ears, rattling inside of your head like so many broken pieces of something skittering across the basin of your skull)

a voice, you realize, but it takes a moment with all the hands on you, it’s speaking, he’s speaking, trying to speak. You hear symbols and you try to understand. You used to speak this language.

He touches you with grasping urgency, holding your shoulders to steady you, tracing your spine, your clavicle, sliding along the hollow of your throat and grasping your chin directing your gaze higher, higher, _look up_ , the symbols are saying, _look at me_ , but there’s only darkness above you, just the void stretching ever-onward in every direction.

 _Remember._ You hear it spoken in hand gestures and starbursts. _Do you remember this?_

The hand on your chin goes lower, presses against your skin, wanders beneath the collar of your shirt. You feel an emptiness there, a hole through the center of the palm. It goes lower and you suck in a harsh breath, lower and you start twisting your body, but there are more hands, more fingers, grasping your limbs to hold you still.

 _Do you remember?_ the symbols are saying, lower, hesitating at your abdomen, drawing circles into your skin, circles struck through with lines, over and over. You can feel it on your body even when he stops. You feel like you can’t breathe.

 _Do you remember?_ he asks you with a voice that is nothing but magico-algebra, just symbols and shapes and gestures, all he has left, all he is now. _Look up. Look at me._

There’s nothing there. You look, you strain your eyes, you search that deep darkness for any trace of him but you can’t see anything.

 _Come and see,_ he says, calling to you, and every hand is leaving you, fading, melting away, until only one remains to beckon you forward. _Come and see for yourself. Remember._ You’re cold, shivering, alone and afraid. You’ve done this before. One crooked finger gesturing for you to come closer, come and see, leading you to nothing but emptiness. You didn’t want to go but he insisted, he told you there was nothing to be afraid of. His hands guided you, rested on the small of your back and urged you forward. And when you looked into the dark, when you leaned over the metal rim and peered down into oblivion, it looked back at you

  
  


and it smiled.

“No,” you say, the word melting, falling apart before it can get past your lips, a dead murmur strangled by your fear. You take a step back and feel the void pulsing, feel it rippling, the maw of a gravitational singularity opening all around you, greedy and wanting with a blinding hunger. “Please, I don’t, I don’t want to look.”

There is a long, terrible silence, the void stilling. You see pinpricks of light like holes poked through a blackout curtain, an unnerving brightness in the dark, five-pointed— _stars?_ you wonder for only a moment.

But they are hands, and each one grasps a part of you and begins to pull you back to him.

“No,” you are begging now, frightened sounds tumbling from your lips, “no, no, no, please, no, please, not this, I don’t, I don’t want….” but they aren’t listening, he isn’t listening, he never listens at times like this, never wants to hear what you have to say. You try to pry his hands off of you but there are more to stop you, more to grab your wrists and stroke your hair soothingly, more to keep your gaze forward, “stop, please stop, don’t make me do this, G—!”

You fall, slipping right through his grip, through the void, the sensation stomach-churning, plummeting through the darkness and landing suddenly, abruptly, in something soft.

Tangled bed sheets. A dream (a nightmare).

The sun comes through the blinds in slender lines. You’re still hyperventilating. You reach over, fingers trembling, and turn on a lamp, the dim glow keeping ~~(him)~~  the shadows in your room at a distance. Your phone goes off on the nightstand, lighting up with a text message notification. You breathe in, wipe beads of cold sweat from your forehead, breathe out, roll onto your side. Squeeze your eyes shut.

Wait until you can’t hear the dripping anymore.

*

**IM DF MP OV XZ PO**

**KH RW MB VS OG PU RW BP DO RW RW FW RM VD IK UN GU LY RW FB IF HU HO KH CZ**

**KH RW MB VS OG PO LG RM OD GU BS IM MU RA ML RF CR**

**KH RW MB VS OG UF KR BR OB VI FG NF PD RB SF FP EA RW**

*

Magico-algebra is your field of expertise, an interdisciplinary science that brings together mathematicians and physicists to navigate the uncharted waters of what was once impossible, or at the very least, purely hypothetical. Once a niche interest and the topic of several highly-influential and controversial papers, it’s grown enough to have its own department at most universities, and South Ebott is no exception.

South Ebott, in fact, was the first to develop a program dedicated to prepare aspiring students for the field, and this was not an accident.

“We could break it down into two crude possibilities,” someone said to you once. “Either every event is a coincidence at random, or every event is a predetermined incident related to all other incidents.”

You surely debated this, as you debated all things. It was how you passed the time (because you didn’t know then how futile that was, how childish and ineffectual, and he let you believe in the comfortable lies of stability and order for a little while). “You mean to say that every event is influenced by the one preceding it, correct?” you asked for clarity. “We’re getting into theological territory now.”

“Perhaps," someone said in amusement.

“Then we’d have to go back to the initial expansion of the universe. If you want to use such a strict cause and effect model, it’s difficult to start from nothing. You can only go back so far before there’s no measurable time, and no causative agents.”

Someone laughed. “You take everything I say rather seriously, don’t you?”

“Not without a bit of skepticism.”

“And that is a healthy mindset to have.” Someone who’s face you can’t recall, someone who bends the light around him, who exists in a void where there should be something but there is only nothing, dark beyond darkness—someone rests a hand on your shoulder. “I’m referring to numbers again.”

“Of course you are.”

He tsked, “Don’t scoff. And why is it this idea in particular you take such issue with? You study magico-algebra, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do. I actually—!”

“Conceived of a hypothesis to demonstrate a concept you’ve deemed ‘reverberating chronology?’”

You'd paused, mouth opening and closing, no sound coming out. You didn't understand then. “...how did you know that? I never told you.”

And this someone—this someone you cannot recall because in every hazy memory you retrieve, you are standing alone—this someone smiles.

*

“Are you sure?” your mother asks for the eleventh time since you got in the car with her for a ride to campus.

(You told her you’d take the bus and she looked like she was going to cry again, so you relented, shrugged, and said you hated to trouble her but a ride _would_ be convenient.)

It’s raining again today. The city looks blue, skyline mirrored in rippling puddles, a replica of the world above like the monster’s Underground. You tell her you’re sure. You think it’ll help.

“You know, you’re right, I bet it will.” She sounds hopeful. “But if you need to come home, you just call, okay? I’ll come get you, I’ll drop everything and come get you.”

She clutches the steering wheel in a white-knuckle grip, hands trembling. The radio slips between a pop song and white noise, a soft and monotonous tone. You bristle and quickly turn it off.

(A dream—or a memory?

You suggest music for the lab. Something quiet and subdued, relaxing. Someone says he’ll consider it and brings a radio in.

You don’t remember any music coming from it, only screams for help.)

Your mother lets you out at the end of a circle drive in front of a familiar six story building with a sign on the front lawn reading, “SOUTH EBOTT UNIVERSITY | PHYSICS BUILDING.”

“I’m going to be alright,” you tell her, but you can’t look her in the eye when you say it.

She doesn’t look at you, either, saying, “I know. I know you will be.”

It looks the same as it did five years ago. You walk through the same hallways you always did then, corridors with high ceilings and tall windows, the stone floor and exposed crisscrossing pipes in the ceiling giving it a modern, industrial vibe. You pass familiar lecture halls and peek in through the doors, seeing some professors you recognize and some you don’t, watching the next incoming class furiously scribbling notes on magic theory and particle physics.

A pair of double doors at the end of the hall leads to lab rooms and offices.

(A dream, or perhaps a memory.

Tall double doors. Walls of glass on the observation deck. Heat haze and liquid fire rippling on the horizon.

And a space there by the windows, a silhouette, a hole punched straight through your memory, through the fabric of reality, left ragged and unraveling.)

You stop outside of one of the labs, taking a deep breath. This used to be your lab where you worked with the other graduate students, where you laughed at overdramatic popular science documentaries and complained about research funding. There were only a handful of you then, one of South Ebott’s first classes of magico-algebra students, and you were close. You looked out for each other, supported one another, shared many of the same goals and dreams. You wonder if they saw the papers, if they know you’re still alive.

Your heart beats faster. Timidly, you knock.

“Hey.” A stranger opens the door, a woman you don’t recognize. You peer past her and your heart sinks. There are half a dozen students in the lab and you don’t recognize any of them. It’s been five years; you shouldn’t have expected time to stop.

(But you did, and you feel that’s normal, feel that’s only natural since there are places where there is no time, and sometimes you forget where there is and where there isn’t.)

“Can I help you?” she prompts. The students behind her have all stopped what they were doing, turning to stare at you.

You swallow nervously. This was a bad idea after all. Slowly, you back away from the door.

“Wait, hold on,” someone behind her says. The door opens the rest of the way and a young man pushes past her. “Oh, jeez, it’s really you!” he laughs, sounding ecstatic. “You’ve gotta come in, please. We need to ask you something.”

The woman looks confused but lets her colleague drag you into the room by the arm, though you see realization flicker across her face as you pass her. “Oh!” she gasps. “You’re—! Oh wow, I had no idea! Sorry, you looked different in the paper.”

The students cluster around you nervously, asking to shake your hand, some clutching research proposals that they keep pushing towards you. You don’t know what’s happening and turn to the man for an explanation. He’s standing by the whiteboard, green marker in hand, writing out a few symbols.

(A memory, yes, this one is a memory; lab assistants, colleagues, friends. A stick of chalk is traded back and forth, and sometimes you bicker and sometimes you laugh. It's the closest to home you've ever felt.

But someone is watching, and that drapes a heavy cloak of fear over the lab.)

“We’ve all read your work,” he says, back turned to you as he pauses, trying to remember the rest of the equation. “I actually wanted to expand on the reverberating chronology hypothesis. Since you’re back, though, we could even co-author a paper! I mean, if you want. It’d be awesome to work with you.” He glances back over his shoulder. “Sorry, I got a little overexcited. I’m Nick. That’s Tilly,” and gestures towards the woman before he introduces you to the rest of the students gawking at you.

You see a very familiar incomplete proof on the board behind him, one used in a paper five years ago that you never finished.

“You read my work?” you ask. “All of you?”

He must sense your unease because his smile falls when he explains. “Yeah. Ah, I guess you haven’t heard yet. Everyone thought...well, Dr. Patel asked your parents if she could make your research available to students and faculty here, even the stuff you hadn’t finished yet. No one’s published anything based on yet, of course. We ran into a few problems.

You’re only half-listening, drawn to the whiteboard and the symbols on it, numbers, letters and arches, a language you were once fluent in. You realize, as you stare up at it, that you haven’t lost that fluency, and uncap a red marker. “Because it isn’t done,” you say.

Nick nods. “Yeah. Oh, but, I had an idea, and tell me if I’m totally on the wrong track here, but—!”

You don’t mean to cut him off but you start writing furiously, marker squeaking across the board as you slash through the places where you know you made a mistake and rewriting chunks of the proof. “I was wrong,” you say, “fundamentally wrong. This statement here, this is correct, but I began with an incorrect assumption.”

(A memory, another one, too many at once, you’ve been here and you’ve done this, you’ve done this before. Someone stood behind you and watched, someone grasped your wrist with cold, hard fingers, someone whispered something you can’t remember and you feel—you felt? You still feel it—their weight along your back, a hand sliding down your throat and dipping beneath the collar of your shirt, another at your waist, another tracing your lips. Always so attentive it was overwhelming.

“If I may borrow your attention for just a moment,” someone had said in a flirtatious purr that both excited and frightened you with how easily it weakened your knees. You might’ve said something about the whole thing being terribly inappropriate, or at least unprofessional, but you were kidding, you didn’t really care, you needed this and your body arched into the touch as you looked up, and then—

You saw—)

The lab falls silent; you think you can hear the analog clock on the wall ticking, leering down at you, whispering at you to hurry up, _hurry up, you’re running out of time_ , but you ignore it because it’s wrong.

(“We have done this before,” someone said, frantically and desperately, holding onto you so tightly yet you still slipped through his fingers. "How did I fix this?”)

The board is covered in red, Nick’s clean green copy of the proof scarred by your hands, dripping corrections and oozing adjustments. You circle a string of characters written across the top of the board. “This,” you say, “is the problem. I started out assuming that I was working with this set, the set of all things, and I was wrong. You have to account for the null set, for things that do not exist, simultaneously. You have to reconsider its meaning. It sounds ridiculous, but it isn’t, I can prove it, I can—!”

Your marker hits the metallic edge of the board and you freeze. You’re out of room.

(Out of space? Out of time? You him dripping and your breath catches in your throat.)

You put the marker down and step back from the board. It looks, at a glance, like total chaos, a disorganized mess of nonsense scribbles, but something is there if you read it carefully. It makes sense to you, at least. The silence is broken by Nick saying, very quietly, “holy shit,” and then the other students feel it’s alright to laugh. You find it contagious, though your own laughter is uncertain, a bit anxious and confused.

You haven’t thought about your unfinished proof in five years, have you? You don’t recall finding the solution. Do you even have a solution? You feel like you do.

(In one of these memories, you do. You just have to find them all and sift through them.)

The students all start taking pictures of the proof with their phones and you do the same, feeling a little more at ease. This is something more familiar to you, something you’ve felt before; the camaraderie and the awe at the sheer power of magico-algebra, the things that unfold before your eyes and on scratch paper. It makes you feel better, like you’ve fixed something.

“Wow, I just…” Nick shakes his head. “Wow. I don’t even know what to say. You’ve been working on it this whole time?”

You shrug.

“No, seriously, were you?” he presses. “I knew you were brilliant, but this is almost unreal. Alphys and I have been puzzling over this thing since she came to the department and we were just talking about this a few days ago, actually. She said she thought she had a solution, based on another proof she’d done, and it works just like this one.”

“Alphys?” you ask.

“Yeah, she’s an associate professor here. Came after you were already gone. I’m doing research with her.”

Alphys. The name rings a bell, but you don’t know why. The more you try to think about it, the further it seems to float away from you.

“Wow,” Tilly laughs, “just like Fermat!”

You have a strong, visceral reaction to the name, remembering a conversation or a dream of a conversation you just had and keep having. Is it strange to think this might not be a coincidence?

(Not when there are no coincidences. Not when all things and every event is pre-determined, set into motion by a previous event, dominos toppling over and marbles knocking into one another.)

“Alright, gang,” you hear as the lab door opens again. A monster—tail sticking out beneath a lab coat, a nervous hunch and glasses resting on a protruding snout—steps inside. “H-how’s everyone doing today? I, um, stopped on the way to pick up some snacks, since midterms are coming up, and I thought…”

“Perfect timing!” Nick calls, dragging you over to the monster by the arm. “Alphys, you’ll never guess who came in today.”

Your eyes meet and she freezes mid-stride, voice dying in her throat. It feels like someone just dropped a bucket of ice water down your back, but _why_?

Nick doesn’t seem to notice. “Crazy, right? And check out the board, they were just showing us the rest of the proof, and it looks like you were definitely onto something—!”

“I-I h-h-have to go to th-the b-b-bathroom!” Alphys stammers, slamming the door shut. Hurried footsteps fade down the hallway and the lab falls silent again.

Tilly sighs. “I’ll go get her,” she says, and slips out the door.

You look at Nick while the rest of the students disperse and get back to work. “Is she okay?” you ask.

He shrugs sheepishly. “That was probably my bad. Alphys is a little uneasy around new people, and I mean, you’re kind of a celebrity around here. It might’ve been a bit of a shock. She did that kind of thing a lot when she was new here, but she’s used to all of us by now. Don’t worry, she’ll get used to you, too.”

But Alphys doesn’t come back. Tilly returns ten minutes later to inform everyone that the associate professor ended up going home early, saying she didn’t feel well and not to wait up for her.

(A memory—)

Is she avoiding you?

You don’t want to jump to conclusions. You don’t think you know her well enough to assume anything. Some part of you feels like you’ve seen her before (done this before, done all of this already), like you read horror in her expression and regret in her eyes. 

You don't know why you're afraid, too.

*

“The hardest part,” you told Dr. Schaffer early on, “is just not knowing.”

“Really?” he asked. “We’ve spent most of today talking about nightmares. Should we shift focus?”

“No. I want to fix that first.”

He smiled encouragingly, saying, “I’d caution you against thinking of yourself as broken and in need of fixing. Just think of these sessions as seminars after a long vacation to get you back into the swing of things.”

But you _are_ broken. Something inside of you is turned sideways, skewed, off-balance, and it’s like that because something that should be near it has been forcibly wrenched loose, leaving you with an emptiness that shouldn’t be there.

Something is missing, and that’s the hardest part. You want to explain it, but you can never put it into words. “I just feel like something is…” And you hesitated, even though the word was on the tip of your tongue. You were fighting against your own body to say it. _Missing, it’s missing, there’s a great void where something should be, there’s a hole that doesn’t belong there_. “Something’s wrong.”

That was as much as you could say to anyone.

*

There’s a translucent figure in your picture of the whiteboard, but only in the one you took. It stands off to the side, an amorphous darkness congealing from the shadows in the room, something like a face looming close to the ceiling, and you think you hear someone breathing as you look at it, standing right behind you and making the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. But you don’t feel any warmth, no body heat, just the cold absence of a person.

The whiteboard itself is all wrong, your careful calculations and proofs replaced by a phrase scrawled in a messy, frantic hand.

**VS QA GU PY RM UM MR KH OV DH GU CY**

Despite beads of cold sweat forming at your brow, you look behind you and find nobody there, like always.

Nobody is there.

For some reason, you’re only more afraid.

*

“You know, I was actually an engineering major at first,” Nick slurs, hunched over the bar as he regards you with absolute seriousness through a drunken haze.

The bar—a lively little hole in the wall downtown called Grillby’s that you don’t remember from five years ago—is his and Tilly’s suggestion, the preferred pre-exam getaway for most South Ebott students. The bartender, a monster with a head and hands of fire, occasionally floats by to check if you need anything, though you never hear him speak over the chatter of humans and monsters around you, the sounds of glasses clinking and smooth jazz from the jukebox in the corner filling the air.

Tilly sits between the two of you, swaying on her bar stool, and you catch her when she leans back too far. “I was pre-med,” she adds, smiling appreciatively. “My dad’s a doctor and I thought I wanted to do something like that. Help people and stuff.”

“What made you guys change your minds?” you ask.

They look at each other at the same time. “You did,” Nick says shyly. “Your work, I mean. Took a magico-algebra gen ed and was totally hooked. One of your early graduate papers is required reading for any intro level magico-algebra course now.”

You frown, fairly certain you can guess which dry, dense dissertation ended up as required reading. “Oh. Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he laughs. “It’s amazing. I never minded reading any of your work. It was like reading Turing or Kepler, something historical and foundational.”

Tilly nods in agreement, insisting, “It’s true, it really made me curious about the field in general. This is going to be the next big thing, you know? It’s gonna change the world, and I wanna be a part of that.”

You stare down at the ice melting in your glass, a little overwhelmed. Of course you were passionate about your research, but you never imagined you would inspire other people, and certainly not without even being present. You’re flattered, but you’re also a bit self-conscious knowing an entire class of undergraduates has come and gone and read your unfinished work.

“Hey,” Nick says, reaching across Tilly to nudge you with his elbow. “Don’t look so down. I know that whole scene earlier was a little awkward, but I’m sure Alphys’ll come around to you, too. Just gotta be patient.”

You smile tightly. “Sure.”

“You guys mentioned Alphys?” a stranger pipes up. You glance down the bar and you get that feeling again, just like when you first saw Alphys and it felt like you’d been punched in the gut, all the air rushing out of you, head spinning, world tilting, something starting to slide into place before being yanked out from beneath you. There’s a skeleton monster sitting on Nick’s other side, a half-empty plate of fries marinating in a pool of ketchup in front of him. He rests an elbow on the counter and fixes the three of you with a friendly grin. “You’re all from the magico-algebra lab, huh?” He doesn’t seem to have eyes in his skull but there are small points of light in each of the sockets, shifting focus between the three of you.

“Oh yeah, we are,” Nick says, pride evident in his voice.

“Glad you’re getting out once in a while. Careful not to drink and _derive_ , though.”

It might just be the alcohol, but Tilly almost collapses on top of you in laughter. Nick grabs her arm and pulls her back just in time, but he’s smiling wryly.

You can’t even do that, because his voice and his tone and the horrible joke makes something

(A dream—)

flash before your eyes.

“Sans?” It slips out before you can stop it.

There’s a terrible silence. The pleasant evening conversation around you doesn’t stop but it does fade into something distant and muffled. You don’t know how you know his name, but something tugged it to the forefront of your mind.

(A dream—isn’t it?)

He looks almost as surprised as you, and maybe almost as frightened, sweat dotting his skull, going rigid in his seat.

Nick glances between the two of you and, even intoxicated, seems to realize that there’s something important you have to talk about. “Hey, let’s get going,” he says to Tilly, patting her back and rousing her from her stupor. “We’ll see you at the lab, alright?” he calls back to you as they leave. You nod, only half paying attention to the two of them stumbling out the door and stopping at the curb to hail a taxi.

Neither of you move any closer, leaving two empty bar stools between you. The space feels hungry, beckoning. You don’t want to look at it. There are a couple thousand words trying to escape you all at the same time and you’re choking on them, unable to squeeze just one out for the longest time. “It’s me,” you tell him, and you give him your name, waiting to see a flicker of recognition in his eyes. “Do you…recognize me?”

“Heh, well, yeah,” he says, but his words are colored by apprehension and his nonchalance is slowly slipping, bony fingers tapping anxiously on the bar counter. “Your face was everywhere a couple weeks back. They found you wandering the Underground.”

“I was missing,” you insist (something is missing, you left something behind down there). “I don’t remember much. The last five years are just this huge blank spot for me, but if I was down there all that time, we might’ve met and….”

You stop. There’s a blankness on his face that drains the excitement out of you. No recognition. No acknowledgement. He looks confused. “Sorry, kid, you’re not ringing any bells for me. Sure you didn’t dream it all up?”

“I…” Your heart sinks. “I don’t know.”

His expression softens somehow, the lights in his eye sockets changing shape. “Hey, don’t make that face. I’m not calling you a liar. It just doesn’t quite add up is all. You say the last five years are a blank, but the barrier’s only been down for two.”

“I know that.” You rest your elbows on the bar counter and put your head in your hands. It doesn’t make sense. None of it makes sense. “Sorry. I just...I’m trying to figure it out.”

(A dream, then—

An uncomfortably long elevator ride deeper into the earth where the air was thick with some unseen, suffocating miasma, a cold chill seeping through your clothes. Nobody liked going down there but you had no choice. There was work to be done.

You stood with your back against the wall, arms wrapped around yourself nervously, clinging to a lab coat far too big for you, the dull hum of your steady descent filling the silence. Sometimes, the lights would flicker and you would catch a glimpse of something in the elevator with you; indistinct, rippling, flickering like a heat haze.

You would hear it dripping and you would close your eyes, inhale, and count to thirty under your breath. Sometimes that made it go away.

Sometimes the world got a little darker on the other side of your eyelids and you heard it breathing, too, low and strangled, and you would tremble until the elevator settled at the bottom and the doors opened.)

“Have you tried going back?” Sans asks, snapping you back to the present. “You know, back Underground. See if anything jogs your memory.”

You nod weakly and stare into your drink. “Maybe that’d help.” It isn’t as though the thought hadn’t occurred to you before. Part of you has been drawn to Mt. Ebott since you woke up on the surface. More than a few times, you find yourself walking back from seeing your therapist and taking a wrong turn, your feet leading you back that way. You feel as though something is waiting for you there, and the thought terrifies you.

“Hey, let me know if you make the trip,” he says, grin suddenly warmer. “Hotland’s closed off to tourists, but I bet I could get you in. Take another look around, might settle your nerves.”

You hesitate. “Thanks, but,” the rest of the words die in your throat. He’s gone when you look back up, bar stool empty, a half-empty plate smeared with ketchup the only sign he was ever there.

You never mentioned Hotland to him. It's never come up. The people who found you claim you turned up on the outskirts of Waterfall.

But everything in you is telling you there’s more to this than you think.

(A memory.

You stand on the observation deck and look out at the shimmering horizon, a vast machine, all wires and pylons, metal glowing red hot with the reflection of churning molten rock lapping at its foundation.

Someone tells you he’s sorry. It doesn’t really fix anything, doesn’t undo the harm that’s been done. But you tell him it’s alright. You tell him you understand. You tell him you’ll be alright.

He knows you’re lying.

This someone takes your hand in his, laces his fingers with yours, and you feel him shaking with regret.)

*

You text your mother on the way home but she’s still waiting for you to get back, and you find her trying to hide the tears she wipes away. “I’m so glad you’re back,” she says, looking and sounding exhausted.

“Yep, I am,” you assure her, walking with her to the stairs. “I’m going to get some sleep, okay?”

“Okay,” she says shakily. “And you’ll be here when I wake up.”

“I will.”

“I know that.” She takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I just...I just worry.”

“Mom,” you say, and you take her hand and look her in the eye and say as convincingly as you can, “it’s okay.”

She chooses to believe your lie. “You’re right. You’re right, it’s okay.” She forces a smile that reminds you of someone else when you reach the top of the stairs. “Goodnight,” she says, and even when you let go, she holds onto your hand just a bit longer, grip slowly sliding down your fingers as though she’s afraid you’ll disappear if she’s too quick.

After getting ready for bed, you lie down and close your eyes, but your phone goes off. You expect something from one of the students at the lab, a message from Tilly or Nick, but when you sit up and open it, you don’t think it’s from either of them.

**VS ZG MR MN YK HB IK HL VT HU XY**

Your desk lamp begins to dim before flickering and finally winking out, leaving you in complete darkness.

**KH FB RM HK DV GU TS DI HW HP LZ PO BY MI YK KH DM HO PO TN DO GU LM PO FM RF KY NK NF WF**

You hear the TV downstairs turn on, a news report interrupted by bursts of static before you hear nothing but white noise.

**DM NK TN BH HG IK YL RW BW GM CQ IA QY YD ZM KR TQ ES NK BR GU LD ZW KB BH RY DM PV UG NK BR**

Your eyes widen as you realize what’s happening and you roll onto your side with your back to your bedroom door, squeezing your eyes shut and trying to steady your breathing.

 _It’s a dream,_ you lie to yourself desperately, _it’s a nightmare. It’s not real._

An unbearable, searing heat chokes you, your pajamas sticking to your sweat-soaked skin. Your phone vibrates on the bedside table again and again but you don’t move and you don't open your eyes.

You’ve practiced for this. You rehearsed it in therapy, came up with ways to turn unpleasant dreams into harmless mental exercises, imagining yourself on a camping trip on a mild evening surrounded by friends, turning the static into their playful banter. But it doesn’t work. It never has, and it never will.

 _Because this isn’t a dream_.

You hear your bedroom door creak open and all the heat rushes out.

(A memory—

His body heat, the two of you pressed skin to skin and the sensation of too many hands smoothing over you—)

You don’t know why he bothers when he could phase right through it. You don’t hear him come closer but you know he has because you feel his presence in the space behind you, his breath tickling the back of your neck, his phantom touch sliding along your side with the brazen familiarity of a lover.

(A memory—

Hands much like this one but firmer, more solid, more real, holding onto your hips, squeezing and massaging and tracing teasingly light invisible equations into your thighs—)

You hear him dripping on the floor, though you know when you look in the morning nothing will be there.

He sits down and the bed dips but then it doesn’t, rejecting his presence in the room. He presses a hand with a hole in the center to your forehead, and it’s warm but it’s frightening, wrong somehow. You get another text notification and you think he must be trying to speak, but you don’t dare look, don’t dare move, try not to even breathe.

He remains at your side for what feels like forever—

(what _is_ forever, because wherever he goes, he consumes time, draws it back into the nothingness and destroys it. You feel it slipping through your fingers like the five years that were torn from your grasp and memory, you feel the air growing stagnant, the darkness becoming deeper.

“We invented it, our first act of magico-algebra,” he told you. Was it him? You try to imagine his voice, his face, but all you recall are words, and even those are vague and distant. “And what a marvelous creation it was, aiding us in charting all that has ever come to pass and all that has yet to occur. We conceived of a cause-and-effect cycle that proceeds in a predictable order, so that one thing occurs before another, and one thing occurs after another, and all things can be organized on a linear timeline.”

You struggle, you push yourself to recall any details, anything at all, but see only fragments of the void; photographs where everyone stands off-center, dead air when someone should be speaking. You can’t figure out if he was erased or if he was never supposed to be there.

“And perhaps it can be argued that time existed even without us, _before_ us, if I should use such constraining terminology. Surely stars rely on time to measure their life cycles, galaxies for their growth and the universe for its expansion. But what if there is nothing? Nothing to see, nothing to experience, nothing to measure. There would be no time, then, would there be? Don’t shake your head, humor me, please. Imagine, if you will, a place such as this, where there is nothing, and imagine yourself as a hypothetical observer. There is no place for time, you see? There is no need for it. Such a place cannot exist in this universe.

 _And yet, I have seen it_.”)

—until he suddenly isn’t there anymore.

You open your eyes when your lamp suddenly flickers back to life, the presence at your back vanishing.

No, not vanishing, because it was never there to begin with. It’s real, and you know that; nothingness is real. It can be expressed by the null set in your proofs, and you can conceive of it.

Nothing is real, and you know, because you have seen it, too.

*

“You couldn’t have seen it,” you argued. “There’s no light, right? There's no way for you to see it and nothing there for you to see.”

“But I have seen it,” he said solemnly. “Or rather, seen voids in existence. Mathematically, we can prove this.”

“Philosophically, too, I’m sure, but for all practical purposes it’s difficult to even discuss.”

“But not impossible.” He stopped, shaking his head. “I suppose we should avoid conducting experiments of this nature again until we have better knowledge of the negotiator’s functions.”

“What?”

“You don’t remember, which is to be expected. The void probably consumed your memory.”

You looked at him, really looked, took in features that had grown so comforting in the time leading up to this, fooled you into trusting him. “I don’t…What? What are you talking about?”

A feeling of reassurance. A smile? “Don’t worry.”

“But I don’t—!”

A sensation of touch; his hand upon your cheek. You shut your eyes and leaned into it. “Don’t worry,” he repeated. “Let’s focus on the task at hand.”

You remember being upset with him. You remember being scared of him. You remember his words and his touch were both soothing and convincing, even when you knew they shouldn’t be, even as a voice from within warned that _you are going to die down here because of him_.

But you can’t quite remember him.


	3. Event Horizon Allegories

At regular intervals intended to simulate a day-night cycle, the artificial lights in Hotland would dim and the whole region would be filled with the glimmering heat of the lava flows that spiderwebbed through the cavern floors. From high above in the observation deck, you pressed your palms flat against the window and felt a faint heat. He stood beside you, hands clasped behind his back. 

You came here together every day after work, and you didn’t talk about experiments or proofs or magico-algebra theory. You enjoyed one another’s company in silence and spoke little unless something absolutely had to be said.

Sometimes, your gaze wandered. The soft, red glow reflecting off of the cavern walls lit his face in warm shades of red and gold, the closest thing the Underground had to a sunset. Sometimes, his gaze wandered, too.

The distance you stood apart gradually grew smaller without hardly a word from either of you.

*

You wake with a faint heat warming your cheeks, tears streaming down your face, a pain like heartache throbbing in your chest.

*

Once, the only way into the Underground was through a hole in the ground, a formation resembling a rabbit hole that held an impenetrable darkness concealing just how far of a drop it really was. A number of disappearances recorded by the towns situated around Mt. Ebott long ago are today attributed to human children wandering into the woods and falling, presumably to their deaths, deep below. 

After the barrier disappeared and human-monster relations were reestablished for the first time in centuries, however, intricate rock faces were revealed to be doors and safe passageways into the Underground, which are today utilized by human tourists and migrating monsters alike.

That’s what the sign at Mt. Ebott National Park tells you right next to the open mouth of one of the artificially-widened entrances leading to the Underground. You glance briefly at it as you follow your tour group inside, clutching a map of the cave system to your chest. Your guide, a bright-faced and middle-aged woman, turns off her flashlight when a soft blue glow fills the cavern.

“Welcome to Waterfall,” she says cheerfully, stopping to give everyone time to take photos. Flowers line the path, growing abundantly in the darkness and emanating a teal light like the water they grow from, shallow pools on either side of the grass walkway. “This part of the Underground utilizes mostly natural lighting provided by luminous pools of water and a variety of bioluminescent organisms. The flowers are particularly interesting.”

“The flowers are particularly interesting,” you hear her voice reverberate back, not off of the cave walls, but from the flower closest to her, and the entire tour group begins chattering excitedly, rushing forward to get a better look.

“These Echo Flowers repeat the last thing they heard,” she explains, her words coming back once again. She waits patiently as the group scatters to try talking to the flowers, and you take the opportunity to squint at your map in the low light. 

The tour only covers Waterfall and parts of the Ruins, though there are tours to the former royal palace in New Home on some days, all of which is indicated in the map margins. This leaves an entire section of the Underground untouched, a large portion lying between Waterfall and New Home that’s labeled Hotland.

“Excuse me,” you call, waving down the tour guide. “There don’t seem to be any tours offered for Hotland. Why is that?”

“I’ve heard that part of the cave system is unstable,” she says. “It’s too dangerous to take large groups down there until better infrastructure goes in.”

This seems like a flimsy excuse to you, considering monsters were living there for centuries. “Do you know if it’s possible to go for research purposes?"

She shrugs. “You know, I’m not sure. We’ve had lots of seismologists and geologists come through here with permits for research, but even they had restricted access. You have to get all that stuff approved by the monster king or queen, and I guess they’re reluctant to sign off on Hotland.” 

One of the teenagers in the group comes over and interrupts your conversation. “What’s that up there?” he asks, pointing at the cavern's ceiling. Everyone glances up at the thousands of little, deep blue star-like lights glittering between the stalactites. 

“Ah, those are a previously undiscovered species of  _ Arachnocampa _ ,” the tour guide says. “Not so long ago, when the residents of Waterfall looked up, this is what they saw rather than a night sky.” Slowly, the group begins to move forward again, eyes fixed on the ceiling even as the guide tries to direct their attention to the ancient tablets affixed to the walls with worn inscriptions. 

You linger at the back of the group, still mulling over the inaccessibility of Hotland, when you think you hear a faint, “hello,” come from one of the flowers just off the path, growing at the water’s edge. You stop dead in your tracks and look behind you, but there's nobody there, the rest of your group up ahead. You wonder if the sound transmitted from somewhere nearby, but it’s all alone, far enough from any other flowers that you don’t think the sound could have carried. 

“Hello,” it says again, so softly that you can’t be sure you aren’t imagining it. You wander over to the flower out of curiosity, looking around carefully for someone lingering behind you, but you don’t see anyone.

“Hello,” you say to it. “You look lonely out here by yourself.”

“You look lonely out here by yourself,” it parrots, matching your voice perfectly.

Little balls of light drift past your face. You aren’t sure if it’s something from the glowworms on the ceiling or some kind of spores from the plants. It’s peaceful here. There’s the sound of rushing water in the distance, a quiet murmur from the many waterfalls that give this part of the Underground its name, but otherwise, it’s silent. As you stare down at the blue glow of the glowing pools rippling gently beside the walkway, you find yourself sinking to the ground to sit at the water’s edge. You think you could probably spend hours here without realizing it, could stay in the dark with the faint flowers of light and the glowworms and be perfectly content, ignorant of how time passed on the surface.

( _ When he spoke of that place of nothingness, _ you wonder,  _ could he have been thinking of something like this _ ?)

“I’ve missed you,” the flower says suddenly and with a clarity it lacked before. You glance around again but you’re alone. You realize the tour group has gone ahead into the next cavern without you, far enough that you can’t even hear their voices anymore. You get to your feet and brush the dirt off of your legs, ready to leave, when you hear, “Please, just a bit longer.”

It’s a deep, masculine voice, words carefully articulated by someone accustomed to using formal speech. You don’t remember hearing anyone who sounded quite like that in your group. “Please,” the flower says, more desperately, and you take a seat to appease it.

“Where are you?” you ask nervously, glancing around the cavern and ignoring the flower’s repetition of your words. You don’t see anyone. You can’t hear anyone speaking. You must be alone.

But you know there must be someone else there speaking to the flower, perhaps sitting just on the other side of it unseen, within arm’s reach, whispering against its petals.

“Nowhere,” the flower says.

“What does that mean?” you ask. You wait, but the flower remains silent after echoing you. 

Then, more softly than before, it utters, “There is so much I have wanted to say.” You stare in confusion. After a moment, it continues, “But now that I can speak, words are failing me.” 

You take a deep breath. “You’re him, aren’t you? You’re the one who comes at night and sends me weird messages.” The flower repeats you. “Who are you?” you demand. “What do you want from me?”

Your words echo into the darkness, followed by silence. You stand up, watching the flower warily.

“I am waiting,” the flower says, “for you to play fair.”

Those are the last words you hear. You wait a minute, and then a minute longer, hoping to hear that voice again—

( _ Why _ , you don’t know)

but you never do.

*

“Have you heard of  _ Alice in Wonderland _ ?” you asked him.

(The picture is clearer to you now. 

You stood in a sterile, white room with large glass windows, glaring light beyond them. There was a blackboard and a whiteboard that dominated the wall space, but he preferred the former—he liked the feeling of chalk, the particles it left behind. Sometimes you had to use both just to make your equations fit. You have a voice to associate with the thought of him now, something soothing and calm. You wore lab coats and spoke freely to one another because you trusted each other.

For now.)

“I don’t believe so,” he said, and he tore his gaze away from the chalkboard to give you his full attention.

“There’s a famous book on the surface called  _ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland _ ,” you explained. “It’s about a child who falls through a rabbit hole into Wonderland, where she meets a bunch of strange creatures.” 

You thought he’d be curious, as he usually was when you discussed the culture of the surface world, but you remember the chalk snapping in his fingers.

(Sans smiled the same way; so widely it was haunting, so frequently it meant nothing.)

“That’s very interesting,” he said, though he sounded as though he’d rather talk about something else. “What made you think of it?”

And you realized for the first time as you looked at him then, at a face you still can’t completely remember through a haze of foggy memories, that something was wrong.

“It reminds me of myself,” you said. “I’m no Alice, but if you ever read it, you’ll see what I mean. It has some interesting mathematical themes.”

At that, he looked relieved. “I see,” he said, and then looked back at the blackboard.

You frowned in concern. “Did it remind you of something else?”

“No,” he said, “not particularly,” letting half of the broken chalk fall to the ground. The sound echoed, nearly deafening, in the tension that slowly unfolded between the two of you.

*

Raindrops gather on the outside of the bus window, streaking across the glass and blurring the city lights into orange and golden blots. You sit in the back facing empty seats and watch streetlamps and foot traffic and the occasional storefront pass by, feeling half-asleep. 

One of the people a few rows ahead of you is reading the newspaper and the headlining article has a picture of you in the hospital. “Student’s Recovery Leaves Unanswered Questions” is the headline, a much more flattering and far less accusatory tone than the stories you’ve seen circulating recently. Public interest in your reappearance has returned with a vengeance and everyone is talking about the implications now, what it means that you were gone before the barrier fell. King Asgore and Queen Toriel have wisely remained out of the public eye as much as possible, declining to comment, and some people have taken this as some kind of admission of guilt. 

The whole thing is exhausting. You don’t want to talk to any reporters. You don’t want to be used as the centerpiece of a political debate. You just want everything to go back to normal. You don’t think that’s too much to ask for. 

You read through your old text messages. A few of your old colleagues from the magico-algebra department have finally gotten back to you. They’re all graduated, all moved to different places to continue their research or teach at different places. It’s nice to hear from them, but it’s also a reminder that the world went on without you, and their paths have diverged from yours. You have a few from your parents, asking what time you’ll be home (Mom), what you want for dinner (also Mom), and if you feel up for a family trip one of these weekends (Dad). There’s some from Nick and Tilly, too, inviting you out to Grillby’s and asking for some advice on their proofs.

And then there’s the other ones.

**VS ZG MR MN YK HB IK HL VT HU XY**

The bus shudders to a stop at a covered bench. You aren’t paying attention to who gets on or off until you hear an enthusiastic, “Yo! Hey!” The kids you ran into before your last appointment come down the aisle, seating themselves across from you. “Hey, I saw your picture on the news again today!” the monster says.

You can’t quite muster a smile. “Ah. Yeah.” Neither of them say anything after that, as though sensing your unease. You try to change the subject. “You two spend a lot of time downtown, huh?” 

“Visiting friends,” the monster explains. “We’re playing a really cool game! It’s a treasure hunt with secret codes and stuff. We go around town and find them hidden in different places, and they tell us where to look next.” The human nods in agreement and pulls out a notebook, flipping through the pages until they find what they’re looking for and hand it across to you. You glance down at the page curiously. There are several sentences spaced a few lines apart on the page, written in a childish scrawl. All but the newest one in the middle are crossed out.

**RQG AGJR BEMG NW UR RQG WXMRQ GHXRR MWGI HXXTWRXKG**

The children look at each other, grinning, while you puzzle over it. “Pretty cool, right?” the monster says proudly. “We’ve figured out all the codes so far because we know the...uh....” The human signs something for them, and they nod vigorously. “Oh, right, the cipher-key-thingy! Yeah! So we can read it but nobody else knows what it says.”

Something flashes before your eyes, and you don’t know what, (dream, memory, something else, both or neither), but you find yourself smiling for some reason, unable to help yourself. You know this game. You’ve played it, even before your missing five years. “I bet I could figure it out,” you tell them. 

The kids look at each other in disbelief. “Yo, no way,” the monster scoffs, and the human nods emphatically. "Prove it!”

They jump over to your side of the bus, sitting on either side of you, watching as you take a pen out of your bag and start writing underneath the first line. “Cryptography is actually one of my hobbies,” you say. “If I had to guess, you guys are using a monoalphabetic cipher. You’ve changed out every letter of the alphabet for a different one.” You underline a few of the letters. “There’s an awful lot of Rs and Gs in this sentence. E is the most common letter in English, so one of these is probably E.”

They’re both quiet, eyes as wide as saucers as they lean over to watch. For the first time in recent memory, you’re having  _ fun _ . How long has it been since you’ve solved a cipher like this? How long has it been since you’ve made your own, encrypted messages around the lab for your friends in the magico-algebra department to find and solve or vice versa? 

(Five years, probably. For some reason, it feels like a lot longer.)

“Ah, okay, so actually R is standing in for T, and G is standing in for E.” You explain what you’re doing out loud as you scribble out your mistaken guesses and slowly fill in the rest of the message, until you write out something coherent.

**THE NEXT CLUE IS AT THE SOUTH EBOTT USED BOOKSTORE**

“And voila,” you say, grinning when you hand the notebook back. The children both stare at it in shock before turning their attention back to you. 

“What! For real!” the monster exclaims. “That was amazing!” 

You laugh and wave them off. “I’ve been doing it for a long time, that’s all.”

“That’s so cool! You should hang out with Sans.”

You freeze at the name. “Sans?”

Both of the children nod, but the human leans over a bit to look out the window behind your head and seems to see their stop, tugging on the monster’s shirt. “Oh, we gotta go soon,” the monster says. “But yeah, Sans taught us the code stuff. He’s really awesome at it, I bet you’d be good friends!” 

The bus slows down when you turn the corner onto a residential street. The human shuts the notebook and tucks it away, but signs something to their friend quickly, still looking curiously at you. “Oh yeah! So, if we got good at this, could we figure yours out, too?” the monster asks eagerly.

You stare back at them. “My what?”

“Your secret code.”

You realize they’re both staring down at your phone sitting in your lap with the text message still displayed. “Ah, no, not quite,” you say uneasily. “This one’s a little more complicated.”

“Are you on a treasure hunt, too? Where are you supposed to go next?” The bus crawls to a stop and both of the children get up to leave. You look back down at the message. 

“Nowhere,” you say quietly, shutting off the screen.

*

Your back slammed against the glass and he was everywhere suddenly, he was all over you, a hand braced beside your head, another cupping your chin, grasping your hips and sliding along your sides and smoothing your lab coat off of your shoulders and leaving it crumpled on the floor. You lost track of how many were touching you because you couldn’t look away from his face, an intensity you’d only seen when he told you about his experiments and hypotheses.

He wanted to test you, wanted to solve you, wanted you so wholly and fiercely and passionately that you could nearly hear your own heartbeat as it hammered in your chest. He came closer, the side of his face brushing your cheek as he whispered against your ear, “Are you sure?” in a voice that sent shivers down your spine.

“Please,” you said hoarsely, clinging to him as your legs started to tremble. One of the hands slipped beneath your shirt, fingertips sliding slowly up the center of your chest. 

“Say my name.”

You opened your mouth but your voice caught in your throat. His name. What was his name? What  _ was it?  _ You couldn’t remember. Why couldn’t you remember?

“My name,” he pleaded with you, his hands grasping at you more frantically, more desperately, pinching and scratching you, and you winced, pushing at him weakly, trying to tell him he was hurting you.

Your hands went through him, sank into a cold, rippling body that ebbed and flowed around you, stuck to you like tar and drew you in like quicksand. You shivered and tried to pull away, tried to get away from him, out of him, fought to yank your arms free but your legs were just as stuck, his shadow flooding the floor and pulling you down into him.

“Stop,” you begged him, “please, please don’t do this,” twisting in his grasp, tugging yourself backwards. You felt his hands all over you, sliding down your back and rubbing your shoulders as though trying to calm you. He cupped your face and forced you to look up, to find him in the darkening room as his presence filled it, his face above you, smiling at you. 

_ My name _ , you felt him say, in vibrations and echoes and the way the vast emptiness of him moved. 

You felt his fingertips dig into your cheeks, something desperate in the way he asked you, one last time,  _ Say my name, please, remember it _ , before the darkness swallowed you whole, and—

*

You wake with a cluster of unfamiliar consonants and vowels on the tip of your tongue, a word, a name, one you swallow back down reflexively as though afraid to let it escape.

Not yet. You can’t say it yet. You aren’t ready.

The shadows in your room are staring, seemingly shifting impatiently. You ignore them. 

You’re afraid of what you’ll call when you say it aloud.

*

**u busy?**

The text comes unexpectedly in the evening while you're sipping at a cup of hot chocolate in a coffee shop on campus, the sender an unfamiliar number. A couple seconds later, you get another.

**its sans. heard u associated with the kids as you commuted across town the other day.**

The pun barely registers. You set your drink down on the table and text back, “How did you get my number?” There’s a lengthy pause before you get a reply. While you wait, you skim through the textbooks Nick and Tilly loaned you, brand new this year for the incoming class of magico-algebra students. You’re thinking about applying to the graduate program. You need to give yourself something to do. 

(You need to distract yourself from the way the mountain is pulling you, urging you back into the depths.)

**not sure. it was already in my phone.**

**anyway r u free right now?**

**i thought we should catch up**

The books no longer have even an ounce of your attention. Your heart is pounding in your chest, a loud and panicked rhythm that fills your head and leaves you almost dizzy with apprehension. With some reluctance, you type out, “You said you didn’t remember me.”

He takes his time responding. You tap your fingers against the wood surface of the table and glance around nervously. 

**i lied**

**meet me in front of grillbys**

You don’t want to go but you feel yourself getting to your feet anyway, compelled by some part of you that still wants to know, that wants to go back and wants to remember, no matter how much the rest of you is content to leave the past where it belongs.

(That part of you knows it doesn’t work like that, that the “past” isn’t going to stay there, that it’s just going to loop back around and find you again whether you want it to or not, so you might as well meet it head-on.)

You’re trying to make excuses every step of the way, trying to convince yourself to back out and go home, your feet are moving and you aren’t stopping. You walk through the rain until your shoes are filled with water and your jacket is sticking to your arms and all you can hear is the dripping in and out of your head.

Sans waits, as promised, on the sidewalk outside of Grillby’s, cell phone in hand, the other jammed in his jacket pocket. A deep growl of thunder resounds in the distant sky above you. “Hey,” he greets, waving casually, but he looks like a mess. He doesn’t have an umbrella, either, and the rain slides down his skull and weighs down his coat, making his footsteps splatter on the concrete. The lights in his eye sockets are half-darkened as though in exhaustion. 

You don’t know what to say to him, where to begin. You don’t say anything for a while, just standing in the rain staring at each other.

Sans stuffs both hands into his pockets and looks off somewhere in the distance. “The rain makes you think about it, right?”

You frown in confusion. “Think of what?”

“Being down there. The...the three of us.” He chokes on the number, like it’s not the one he wants to say. 

“Three of us?”

“You, me, Alphys...” He trails off. No “and” at the end, but for some reason you think there should be one. “Sorry about lying. This stuff’s got us all a little uncomfortable, though, you know? Had to sleep on it. But then the kid said they saw you on the bus and I thought...probably not a coincidence. Just doesn’t work like that.”

You swallow a lump in your throat. He knows. How does he know? “Right.”

“So. Anyway.” Sans shrugs. “Wanna walk while we talk? I’d say we should just get out of the rain, but it’s easier to think out here.”

You don’t know what he means, but you agree, falling into step with him. “You wanted to catch up?” you remind him.

He keeps his gaze straight ahead. “Right. And I admit, I probably don’t have a great handle on this whole thing, either, so bear with me.”

“You remember, don’t you?” you ask. “You know we’ve met before in the Underground. We worked together in—in a lab of some kind, with Alphys. With...with Alphys....” That isn’t right, is it? You’re doubting that there was anybody else there but certain there was at the same time. There were three of you down there, working together—

(and you had no choice, but they stayed with you, you remember that, they worked for the betterment of monsterkind, and you were just along for the ride.

But you don’t think his goals were the same.)

You shake your head. “No, that’s not right. There was someone else. He was there.”

“Right. Him.” His tone shifts to something reluctant. He’s retreating again, closing himself off from you like he did when you first met.

(But it wasn’t your first meeting at all, you know that now.) 

“Don’t do this to me now,” you say, pleadingly. “I just want to know what happened. To me, to all of us.”

Sans stops, glancing back over his shoulder, and his whole grin seems weaker. “Alright,” he sighs. “Let’s go a little farther and I’ll tell you what I know. But I can’t promise you answers, kid. If anything, it might start making less sense.”

“I don’t care,” you insist, and there’s a lighthearted twinkle in his eye.

“Heh. You were like that back then, too,” he mutters, starting to walk again. “Way too stubborn for your own good. I think he liked that about you.”

It becomes clear that Sans is intent on leaving town, heading in the direction the Mt. Ebott National Park. As the sidewalk gradually changes to gravel and then dirt, the crowds around you thin out until all you can hear is the chittering of wild animals and the rumble of storm clouds.

“Can you tell me about him?” you ask as you ascend a hilly trail up one of the mountain’s less-traveled hiking paths, stopping at an observation area.

Sans gives an apathetic shrug, resting his bony hands on the wooden fence at the very edge of the dirt before the cliff drops off into a deep valley below, but you can tell he’s uneasy. “What’s there to tell?” 

You walk over to him and look out at the park, the main cave system closed off for the evening. “Anything. His...his name, at least.”

“Can’t. People who don’t exist don’t have names.”

You glance at him. “Don’t exist?”

He nods slowly. “It took a long time for me to get this far,” he admits. “At first, I couldn’t even think about him. I’d get distracted, forget what I was thinking about. It still comes and goes. But Alphys and I talked it over and managed to put the pieces together. Some of our lab notes had huge sections that were just blank, right in the middle of the page, for no reason. Like they’d been tampered with. That’s how it starts, right? With something missing. First  _ sine  _ of madness, I guess.” 

He pauses, glancing over to see if you’ve cracked a smile, but you’re cold and tired and you’re standing on the very mountain that swallowed you whole and kept you for five strange, missing years, and it really wasn’t that funny. He shrugs and keeps going. “A lot happened after that and we didn’t have time to worry about something we couldn’t be sure was real or not. Guess you know all about that, though, huh?”

You stare back at him this time and find him looking at you patiently, as though awaiting confirmation. “What?” 

“After he was...erased,” Sans says with difficulty, waiting again, eye lights dimming further at your continued silence. “You know what I’m talking about, right? That’s the other reason I lied, kid, I was sure you’d never want anything to do with us again after….” 

He stops, taking in your puzzled expression.

“You don’t remember that.” It’s not a question but a flat, despairing statement. Nervousness sets in on his face.

“Remember what?”

He looks like he wants to say something, but he’s silent for a long time. At last, he says, “Are you sure you don’t remember anything?”

“I remember him,” you say. “I remember you, and Alphys, and being in a lab somewhere in Hotland. Doing magico-algebra together. Talking about Fermat.” You think back, trying hard to retrieve something, anything else, but nothing comes now when you need it. “I’m told I was found in the main cave system in Waterfall, and that I’d been gone for five years. I woke up in the hospital.”

Sans reaches for his phone, checking something before he says, “When you two talked, it always scared us. Alphys and I were just assistants back then. Kinda new, kinda clueless. We didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into.” He presses a button and you feel your own phone buzz in your pocket, and quickly retrieve it to see he’s sent you a picture.

It looks like a camera capture of a physical photograph, a bit of light glare bouncing off of it. Alphys is on the far right, blushing a bit with her hands clasped together anxiously. You’re beside her, smiling in a lab coat that doesn’t fit you right, nearly touching the floor. You aren’t quite looking at the camera. Sans is on the right, dressed in the same sterile white the rest of you are wearing, grinning at the camera and flashing a peace sign with one hand.

There’s an empty space beside him large enough for someone to be standing and nobody there.

**“MR AR ED RM HV NF WF AO KZ”** is written in the bottom-right corner.

You can feel him staring, taking in your expression. “You know what it says.” He isn’t asking, but you still shake your head.

“Not exactly.”

“But you could figure it out. I think...I’m pretty sure, actually, that you two used to write notes like this for each other.”

(Someone—him, it was him, he’d been afraid, you remember, maybe even terrified. 

But he tried to hide it, clutching the note you’d left for him on the table in one hand, crumpling it beneath his pale fingers. “This isn’t a good way for us to communicate,” he’d told you, and you felt like you were being scolded even though you’d done nothing wrong.

“You told me to leave notes if I couldn’t find you,” you argued.

“I’ve changed my mind. Your notes might be intercepted by someone else.”

“Why does that matter?”

“Because you are not supposed to be here!” he shouted, and your eyes widened. You can’t remember his face then, but you remember being touched, having your shoulder grabbed hard enough to hurt. He seemed to realize what he was doing then and quickly let go, but it was too late. You had caught a glimpse of what was coming. Reverberations from the future. “I’m sorry,” he said softly, “I’m merely concerned for your safety. You know we have a complicated history with humans.” 

You had no way of knowing what would happen, what sorts of things he was doing and what further lengths he would go to—you couldn’t know—and yet something in you knew to be afraid. 

“Perhaps we should devise a code of some sort,” he said, and you knew from his tone that he was trying to lighten the mood, his grip on you softening into a light, reassuring touch, though the shadow of his earlier roughness still lingered on your skin. “That would provide some entertainment as well, wouldn’t it? You said you’re very familiar with cryptography.”

And even though you’d had that glimpse into the future, even though you’d been warned, the comforting weight of his hand and soothing voice—the way he looked at you, with respect and adoration and camaraderie—made you forget it all in favor of the comfort you hoped you’d find in him. “I know a little bit,” you said modestly, and you remember his smile then, small and simple, but you could tell he was pleased.

The more you try to focus on it, the more warped that smile becomes, until his face is a twisted and damaged façade that hides what he’s thinking, yet another barrier to add to the dozens that already lie between you.)

You return to the present out of the memory and find Sans staring at you. You don’t know what to say. You stare down at the picture and text. You’ve always suspected that you knew the cipher used in these messages, but you’ve never tried to solve it. You’ve been afraid to. 

You hear Sans’ footsteps retreating and look up to find him starting back down the trail. “You can stay longer, if you want,” he says, “but I’m gonna get going. I know we’ve got more to talk about, but we should take it slow. Just trust me on this.”

Despite your frustration, you nod in agreement. Sans obviously remembers more than he’s telling you, and he knows something you don’t. You feel you should defer to his judgment on this.

But something is still bothering you. 

“Hey, Sans,” you call before he leaves, “do you still have this picture somewhere? A hard copy, I mean?”

He stops, but he doesn’t look back. “Yeah. Why?”

“It looks old. Kind of faded, anyway. It’s not that old, is it? Were we doing something in the lab that would’ve affected it?”

You don’t hear a response and look up curiously. Sans hasn’t left but he isn’t facing you anymore. “You know,” he says, “two years ago, there was a human kid who fell into the Underground and changed things for the better. That’s the whole reason we’re up here now. That was the first human I’d seen in…” He pauses. “A hundred years, give or take.” He glances back over his shoulder at you finally, his stare dark and unnerving. “How long’d you say you were missing for again?” 

*

“I don’t understand,” you said helplessly.

You had been afraid at first, overcome with paralyzing fear as you looked down at your own hands and realized you could see right through them, your entire body shifting inexplicably into grayscale. You thought it would hurt, but fading brings with it a numbness, stealing your pain first, traveling along your nerves and taking all of your sensation away before it rips your emotions from you, leaving you with nothing but emptiness as you begin to collapse inward like the nanosecond before a high mass star’s supernova.

He stands beside you, one hand flying over the keyboard below the monitor, the other resting on your translucent palm. There’s a hole there now; right through the center of his hand, you can see the floor. It wasn’t there before.

“What’s happening to me?” you asked.

He didn’t look at you, preoccupied with his typing. He acted like he didn’t hear you, muttering to himself, “I can fix this. There must be a way to reverse the process, to stabilize it, at least. There must be something.”

He was afraid, too. He was turned away from you but you could hear it in his voice and feel it by the way he clutched your hand, afraid to let you go. You didn’t know if it mattered. You could feel yourself sliding through his grasp, phasing through him. You started to sink, your feet vanishing into the floor, and you tried to call out to him but the void had stolen your voice, too.

“You were always meant to come here,” he was saying, and he was still holding his hand out but he didn’t notice he was holding nothing at all. “You had no choice. These are echoes returning to us from time that has not passed yet. Reverberating chronology guaranteeing the progression of events, effect-cause and effect. This has all happened before. We have done this before.” He bowed his head, hands clenching into fists. “How do I fix this?” 

You couldn’t answer him; you were too far away to even see him, to see anything, his voice little more than a fading echo. You were floating and sinking, motionless yet being pulled in every direction at once, and you thought it should hurt but you couldn’t feel any pain.

You thought you saw, in the moment before your sight, too, was stolen, a shape in the void, darkness gathered at the edge of nothingness that warped and flitted closer, and then you felt hands pushing you.

You heard no voices but you felt words in the touch. You knew you’d be alright. You knew you had to go back. You knew there was work to be done.

The first thing you got back from the void—hidden in those hands clasped tightly together, glowing faintly through the holes in their centers—was your determination.


	4. Stars Exhaling

A worn, hard-cover copy of _Through the Looking Glass_ rested open on its spine, splayed over one of the lab counters, pages yellowed and creased. He thumbed through it absently with one hand, glancing back down from time to time as though looking for something, but the rest of his attention was on the chalkboard in front of him. “The Jabberwock Problem” was scrawled across the top with a series of complicated magico-algebra equations beneath.

“Metaphor is a charming way to address one’s problems,” he supplied, your curious expression deepening as you crossed the room and glanced down at the book. “Perhaps it seems childish, though it’s something I find useful in the brainstorming process.”

“Where did you get this?” you asked, though you were almost as surprised by the disembodied limb pressing its index finger to the page as it skimmed the lines, another slipping into your field of view from seemingly nowhere turning the page.

You caught something of a mischievous smile on his face, something that seemed rather pleased by your reaction. “A gift. My lab assistants may have overheard our previous conversation regarding a story about Alice, and thought they would try to find the book.” He set aside what he was doing, turning to face you, the two hands by the book disappearing as he picked it up with his own. “There’s a particular place in Waterfall where surface objects tend to accumulate, carried downstream from up above, sometimes in rather good condition. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the book you were referring to.”

“It’s the sequel. It’s still worth reading.”

He hands the book to you very gently, as though it’s a precious and fragile artifact, and you run your hand over the letters printed on the fraying cover. It’s comforting, somehow, knowing it came from the world above. “I found it enjoyable,” he said. “Though I may have become a tad fixated on the introductory chapters.”

“I noticed,” you said with a smile, coming to stand beside him and handing the book back. You were startled when a third hand materialized out of thin air to take it from you and hold it open in front of him, leaving him one hand free to touch to his chin thoughtfully as he began to write on the board. You look up at the equation. “What exactly is The Jabberwock Problem?”

“What is a Jabberwock?” he asked in return, and you frowned at his insistence on making you do all the legwork instead of just giving you an answer.

(Truthfully, you liked that about him.)

“What, like, in the poem?” you asked.

He nodded. “What sort of creature is it? How would you describe it?”

You peered over to look at the open page. The illustration of the Jabberwock stared back at you with its bared buck teeth, leathery wings outstretched. “Intimidating, I guess. Big and weird-looking.”

“The poem itself is incomprehensible in places, a bit like the beast itself,” he explained. “I’ve come to associate it with my own obstacles.” He stopped, reached for the eraser and removed a few digits from the equation before rewriting them. “The barrier is something like that, vast and seemingly unsurmountable, complicated by its very design, and therefore, in our proposed solutions. But perhaps it doesn’t have to be. Perhaps we simply need to make our own vorpal blade.”

You realized then that he was calculating hypothetical forces and velocities, comparing them to the magical mass of the barrier, figuring the resistance, the push-back, the limits. “I thought you already tried destroying the barrier?”

“With insufficient tools incapable of the force necessary,” he said. You heard then, as you often did in these moments, the quickening pace of chalk skittering and squeaking over the blackboard, his hand barely able to keep up with his brain, equations growing messier as he closed in on the answer. “But just as Alice recognized that the poem was written in reverse, so, too, must we utilize reflection as a means of solving this puzzle.”

He suddenly stopped, stepping back from the board and taking in the entirety of what he’d written, and you stared up in both awe and apprehension. “You want to take the power of the barrier and reflect it back at itself.”

“There are risks, of course,” he admitted. “A potential backlash of magical energy, a gravitational singularity, perhaps something worse. But I believe the idea is worthwhile.”

You felt him watching you, taking in your expression as you read over his work. He didn’t want to proceed without first gauging your reaction. He hoped for your approval, but if you disagreed, you knew he would be ready to argue in favor of his conclusion; he always was. There was some terrible, instinctual fear in the pit of your stomach warning you that you were looking at something that should never, ever be done, but you didn’t know why. You had no way of knowing that.

You turned to him and he looked hopeful, hands clasped together, smiling patiently, almost proudly.

“I think,” you said, “that you need to make it safer. If you’re going to test this, there needs to be some way to make the affected area smaller. You can use the same velocity and the same concentration of magic, but if it were more focused...”

You stopped, worried you were disappointing him or dampening the discovery, and looked up at him cautiously.

He was _beaming_.

“Show me,” he said eagerly, handing you the chalk. Your fingers brushed ever so briefly and you felt something you couldn’t explain and hadn’t expected, something strong, something wonderful, something magic.

He must’ve felt it, too, because he lingered close by as you wrote out a new magico-algebra proof, staying right at your side. There was the faintest, barely-there weight of a hand on your shoulder, squeezing reassuringly, almost affectionately, and it made heat rise to your face.

*

You’re just doing it to pass the time.

It’s a harmless exercise and you won’t actually complete it. You’re doing this hypothetically. You’re doing an experiment. You’re having fun.

You have to repeat this to yourself over and over as reassurance, hushing the nervous part of you warning that this is stupid, this is dangerous, this is going to hurt you somehow, but you’re tired of being in the dark, of not knowing.

The ride into town is another gloomy, rainy one. The forecast keeps predicting sunshine that never comes, but you’ve stopped waiting for it. The rain helps you think. You’re told Alphys has visited the lab a few times, carefully timing her visits so you’re never there at the same time. You’ve resigned yourself to giving her the space she needs until she feels ready to confront you. Sighing, you tap your pencil to the rhythm of the song straining through the radio sitting on the table, not quite recognizable through a filter of distorted, crackling static.

(One of the students built it and brought it in to show off, setting it up on the center table to give you some background noise. It works about half of the time when it isn’t just spouting white noise. You’ve heard that the half of the time it doesn’t work happens to be when you come in.)

You have one of the enciphered text messages pulled up on your phone and you’re looking it over, just because you’re curious to see if you still remember how to do this. That’s all. You’re not actually going to go through all of these, not even a few of them. Maybe just one, just to see. _You’re having fun._

“Hey, you have a minute?” Tilly asks, and you look up from your work. “I’m grading the homework from one of the undergrad classes, and one of the problems on their worksheet doesn’t seem to have an answer.” She has a blue marker in her hand, and the whiteboard is covered in rows of magico-algebra proofs. You set your personal work aside to see what the problem is, but part of your mind is still stuck on it.

It has to be a digram cipher, you’ve decided, something that works with pairs of letters rather than with single symbols or long strings of text. You think that should narrow things down, since you only know so many of those off the top of your head. It has to be something you were fairly confident using. And it has to be something you were familiar with five years ago.

(Or does it?)

You frown, trying to pay attention to the problem Tilly is showing you, but what Sans told you the other day is still bothering you. You’re almost certain he’d been talking about the monster ambassador, the child who disappeared two years ago only to return to the surface with all of monsterkind at their back, determined to reunite two worlds long divided. You’d been told the story more than a few times since waking up in the hospital.

You’re missing the last five years of your memory, but there are a few things you know, most of which doesn’t make sense. How could you have met Sans if the ambassador was the first human he’d met in over one hundred years?

“I think this is the problem,” you say, drawing a line beneath one of the symbols. “This should be a regular subset, not a strict subset.”

Tilly’s eyes widen before she turns, crossing her arms over her chest. “Nick!”

The other student glances up from his own work across the lab table, head propped up on one hand. “What?” he drawls, sounding as though he hasn’t had enough sleep for more than a few days.

“You wrote these practice problems, didn’t you? There’s one that’s unsolvable because you put down the wrong symbol.”

Nick rubs his eyes, glancing at the board. “Oh,” he says simply.

Tilly frowns. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I’ve been up late a lot, that’s all.” He holds up his notebook, messy scribbles in the margins. “It’s because of Fermat,” he says, turning to you. “Alphys brought it up a couple days ago, and I thought I’d take a shot at figuring it out, too, but in a different way than the 1994 proof.”

“You need to get some more sleep,” Tilly says, frown melting into sympathy. “Don’t be up all night working on stuff like that, especially when we have other things to worry about.”

“But that’s just it,” he insists. “Fermat’s last theorem is relevant to the reverberating chronology hypothesis. Not mathematically, but in a symbolic way. I thought, if I could solve it, that’d help me come up with something for the research we’re doing now.”

You set the whiteboard marker down, watching Nick sigh, his weary expression growing hopeless.

He catches your eye and you flinch at the mania you see in him, a familiar sort of obsession.

(You know that look. You’ve suffered for what it brings.)

“It can’t be done. I’ve worked on it for days using every method Fermat could have possibly been aware of, and it’s impossible. Either the original proof is flawed, or something impossible happened.”

You have to look away. He wants answers you don’t have.

“Nick,” Tilly says gently, “it took years for any solution to be discovered. Nobody found the answer in just a couple nights.”

He doesn’t seem to hear her, carrying on, “The rest of your proof makes sense. It all makes sense up to where you left it unfinished. So why can’t it be solved with any method we have today? Is it going to take another hundred years for anyone to figure it out?” He rests his head in his hands, taking a deep breath. “Sorry. I just...I’m frustrated. It doesn’t make sense.”

Tilly looks at you pleadingly, trying to think of something to say to cheer him up, and you sit down across from him.

“Do you understand why my hypothesis has that name?” you ask. “I was inspired by Fermat and conjectures similar to his. I wanted to explain how it could have happened.” You glance at his scratch work, some symbols bolded or circled or scribbled out in frustration. “By reverberating, I mean an echo. Something that happens in the future, further along in our chronology, that bounces back to us. People learn things they couldn’t have known about. Fermat uses a method that won’t be invented for three hundred years.”

He finally looks at you again. “Like,” he struggles to find words that make sense, “like, what, seeing into the future?”

You, too, have a hard time coming up with a way to explain it. It’s always made sense in your head,

(because you’ve felt it)

but it’s hard to put your ideas rooted in the language of magico-algebra into prose. “Like _feeling_ the future,” you say. “Being touched by it.”

“Is that possible?”

You smile weakly. “I’m trying to prove that it is.”

*

“It must not be soundwaves,” he said to you, and you remember being surprised to hear his voice mimicked perfectly by the blue flower sitting on his desk.

“What is that?”

“An Echo Flower,” he said, smiling at the expression of awe on your face. “I’ve wanted to show them to you for some time now, so I asked Sans to bring me one from Waterfall.”

“So it repeats what you say?”

“Precisely,” he said, and the flower dutifully echoed the word. “I’ve done extensive testing on these plants to discover the mechanism by which they process sound, since they have no apparent auditory meatuses. I’ve come to the conclusion that they do not detect sound, but rather soul vibration frequencies.” He seemed excited, speaking more quickly and with more exaggerated gestures. “The flowers imitate these vibrations, which are then interpreted by the listener’s soul and are not truly heard in an auditory sense. But emitting this frequency requires the energy left behind by the original speaker, and with each emission, this energy is drained until the words become meaningless murmurs.”

“I never would have even considered that,” you said, shaking your head. “I just assumed they were magic.”

“Even magic is governed by certain natural laws,” he said, though he seemed pleased that you were impressed. “What inspired me to investigate Echo Flowers in the first place were reports of them speaking on their own. It’s highly uncommon, but from time to time, one hears rumors of an Echo Flower speaking in some dark corner of Waterfall without anything to repeat.”

“Where does that fit into your hypothesis?”

“They are known to react when someone simply passes by,” he said. “In that case, they give off the last frequency they were exposed to. But if an Echo Flower seems to be speaking of its own accord, there’s really only one answer.” He smiled genuinely, as he always did when he felt satisfied at reaching a conclusion. “There must be someone there, who cannot be seen or heard, but whose soul still emits a frequency that the flower can detect.”

You raised a brow. “It sounds like you’re talking about ghosts.”

“Ghosts in the Underground are quite different from the ones humans are familiar with,” he said. “I’m referring to something purely hypothetical now, something that does not exist in any perceivable way, and yet somehow retains a soul that continues to produce these frequencies.”

“Something that,” you pause, confused, “doesn’t exist?”

You don’t remember what he said after that, only that the flower repeated your words and somehow they seemed more ominous than when you’d spoken them.

*

“What’s Hotland like?”

Sans shrugs. You think he’s drinking from the ketchup bottle in his hand, but you don’t know where it goes. “Just what it sounds like,” he says.

Grillby’s is quieter than normal today despite being just as packed as usual, but the TV mounted on the wall in the corner is broadcasting a speech by King Asgore addressing a recent resurgence of anti-monster demonstrations and violence. The other patrons make no noise save for the occasional murmur to their neighbor, eyes glued to the screen. Sans isn’t even looking at it, but he keeps his voice low in respect.

“It’s uncomfortably hot because of all the lava rivers running along the bottom of the cavern. Everything’s powered by converting geothermal energy into magic; that’s what the CORE was made for.”

(A memory—

The observation deck flickering with heat haze, flashing red lights on the looming shadow of a great machine churning the molten rock below. A hand closing around yours.)

“I think I remember the CORE,” you say. “Bits and pieces have been coming back to me lately, just not enough to make sense of it all yet.”

Sans nods in understanding.

“I think I should go to Hotland.” The words spill out of you, and for half a second you’re afraid, wanting to take them back, unsure of why you said them. But you don’t correct yourself because it’s true. You don’t want to go back, but you know you should. “I feel like there’s something important there,” you forge on. “Something I need to see.”

Sans looks uneasy again, sweating a bit. “I told you it’s hard for humans to get in there right now, didn’t I?”

“And you said you’d help me get in,” you say quietly. “I thought we were past this. I know there’s a lot you aren’t telling me, and I get it, I understand, this is hard for me, too. But can’t you at least help me figure it out on my own?”

He sets the ketchup bottle down on the counter and glances down at his hands. “You’re not gonna like it,” he mutters.

“I don’t like the way things are _now_ ,” you insist. “The nightmares, the noises, the vague memories...” _Not knowing. Not knowing is the worst._ “I need to find out what happened.”

Sans studies your face, the lights of his eyes vanishing for a moment, deep in thought. He lets out a sigh and they reappear. “Guess I owe you. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thank you,” you say, relieved, and it’s only then that the rest of his words catch up to you. “What do you mean you owe me?”

“We....” Sans stops abruptly, gaze drifting away from your face. “Eh. I shouldn’t say. He’d want you to remember on your own.”

Your brows furrow in concern. “Is that why you’re hiding things?” you ask. “Because you promised him you wouldn’t tell me?”

Sans shakes his head. “I never made any promises like that, but I know how he is and I know he wouldn’t like that.”

“He wouldn’t even know, would he?  He doesn’t exist anymore.”

Put off by the way he’s looking just slightly past you, you turn over your shoulder but you don’t think you see anyone, either.

Just feel them, the way you do sometimes.

“That’s true,” Sans says, “he doesn’t exist. But I can’t shake the feeling that he still knows what we’re doing.”

*

“You felt it, didn’t you?”

He touched you, gently, nervously, like you were a precious specimen he’d only ever seen under glass, equal parts reverent and fearful. You didn’t have to ask what he meant, because you were still feeling it, it was still coursing through your veins, spreading along your nerves, every inch of you alive and electric and bristling with something like euphoria. “Do you feel it, too?” you asked breathlessly.

He didn't answer at first, two fingers pressed to your throat checking your pulse, a different hand wiping sweat from your forehead, yet another cupping your chin and turning your face for inspection, and each of them brought another wave of that same feeling, leaving you dizzy and clinging to him.

“Yes,” he said at last, and then he drew back, leaving you cold. “Perhaps we should take care to avoid physical contact for a while. I’m sure I can find something to ease your symptoms—!”

“What? No,” you stammered, “no, I don’t—I-I _want_ to touch you.”

He shuddered. You saw it, saw his gaze darken, a frightening, possessive desire in his eyes, but he maintained his distance, stepping back when you stumbled forward. You had to lean against the lab counter to steady yourself, your knees buckling beneath you.

“Please,” you said, “stay, at least. I feel like....”

(Like you’d done this before, all of this, felt this kind of fevered desire from nothing more than the brush of his fingers and wanted him down to your soul.)

You inhaled raggedly when you felt him, a disembodied hand cupping your chin and dragging your gaze up to meet his from across the room. He leaned back against the lab wall, two fingers adjusting the collar of his turtleneck sweater as though it was suddenly uncomfortable. “Stay there,” he said, a tremor noticeable in the words though his voice seemed rougher and lower than you were used to. “Take a moment to calm yourself. If you still feel this way in an hour, come and find me. You know where to look.” He was gone in the blink of an eye, lab coat trailing behind him and nearly getting caught in his haste to slam the door.

The hand lingered for a moment longer in his absence, caressing your cheek as though in apology. You whimpered when it vanished, sunk to your knees, and tried to stop shaking.

*

You don’t hear back from Sans for a few days, but your anxiety is abated by your newfound routine.

You spend every day that you don’t have therapy at the lab in the physics building, arriving at seven in the morning like clockwork.

(Like clocks that actually work, if clocks actually worked, if they were actually measuring anything relevant to you at all and not just spinning in futile circles, drawing infinity upon their faces.)

You feel right here, like you’re back in your element speaking your native tongue, solving equations and doing magico-algebra. Nick puts Fermat’s theorem aside in favor of trying to prove the reverberating chronology hypothesis, and the two of you pool your money together to buy another whiteboard that gets wheeled in one afternoon so you have more space to work with.

As the days go by, you begin to see things out of the corner of your eye; shadows, prying eyes, feet on the other side of the table but there’s no one there when you glance above. It’s only a matter of time before you catch a glimpse of an apparition in its entirety, and one day, you finally do.

They’re barely visible when you find notice them in the back of the lab one morning, standing against the plain white brick wall, both grayscale and translucent, easy enough to miss that you wonder if they’ve been there all along. They’re short, a small tail poking out from beneath a striped shirt, face devoid of emotion as they stare at you—through you, beyond you. They barely come up to your chest. The resemblance to the child on the bus is uncanny.

The radio on the center table should be turned off, but you hear it crackle to life, something like words in the white noise.

“Hello again,” you hear, and you understand that must be their voice. Their eyes are glassy and pupil-less, gaze empty. They don’t really see you at all, but they know where you are, and apparently who.

“Again?” you repeat questioningly.

“We’ve met a few times before.”

“Who are you?”

They take a long time to answer, and in the silence, they seem to fizzle in and out of sight like static distortion on a television screen. “I was told I was a goner,” they say through the radio. “But the doctor was supposed to fix that. If I’m not a goner, then what am I now?”

You shake your head helplessly. “I’m sorry, I don’t know.”

“That’s okay,” you hear, their tone flat and joyless. “I guess I’ll keep being a goner until I figure it out.”

“You mentioned a doctor,” you say hopefully.

The gray monster shifts, suddenly a few inches to the left without moving at all. “Can you picture it?” they ask. “A world just like this one, but he’s standing beside you. It never happens. Someone always makes a mistake. But somehow, he hasn’t been completely erased. Somehow, he always finds you.” They wait a beat. “Doesn’t that scare you?”

“Who are you talking to?”

You startle to attention, turning to find Tilly carrying a box of blueberry muffins into the lab staring at you in confusion. You expect the monster to be gone when you turn back, so you aren’t surprised to find empty air where they’d been standing moments ago. Quiet murmurs of static come from the radio, but nothing you mistake for words.

“I swear, this lab is haunted,” she says with a laugh. “Which reminds me, you weren’t here yesterday but we left the last proofs you did on the board, and when we came in yesterday morning, someone had drawn weird stuff all over it.”

“Weird stuff?” you ask.

“It was probably one of them,” she mutters, glancing back at the students seated at the lab table. “Some joke I’m not getting. Here, I’ll show you.” You follow her over to the table where she sets the box down, and Nick is the first person to leap at it, thanking Tilly profusely with half of a muffin in his mouth. She takes out her phone, going to the picture gallery, and hands it to you.

The image shows the whiteboard mounted on the wall with a series of proofs written across it in both your and Nick’s handwriting, red and green marker respectively. But there’s something extra there written in black, something that makes your eyes widen and your hand fly over your mouth to cover a frightened sound, your heart nearly stopping. Tilly is saying something, asking what’s wrong, if you need to sit down, but you can’t answer. You feel like you’re being pulled away from her, straight through the floor, plummeting into a darkness you’ve fallen through once (twice? Many, many times) before.

**HTЯOᆿ ӘИAЯԳƧ TƧAƎઘ Ǝ⅃ઘATИUOMЯUƧИI ЯUO ƎƆИƎHW**

**J L J D I N D C H O J U P B H I J E L V I R F O**

(A memory—

but it’s stolen from you before you can understand it, twisting, evaporating, turning to nothing. You catch a glimpse of him for a brief, fleeting moment, see lab notes peppered with enciphered messages, feel the joy that overtook you in that moment,

and then it’s all gone and you feel nothing but emptiness.)

You tell Tilly you need a minute, and then you’re stumbling down the hall to the bathroom, splashing cold water on your face, trying to recall whatever you can, but it’s gone again. You look at your own face in the mirror, the exhausted slump of your shoulders, rings of sleep deprivation around your eyes. You press a hand to the glass and watch your reflection do the same.

(“Whence our insurmountable beast sprang forth,” but backwards. You’re remembering. You’ve talked about it before.)

For just a moment, you think you see someone standing behind you, but you spin around and find nobody there. The bathroom lights flicker and the faucet drip-drip-drips into the empty sink basin. You have to go home. You have to solve this now. Not knowing is going to kill you.

(You don’t know what knowing will do to you yet.)

*

Flashing lights and shimmering heat haze, simulated nighttime. The machine, the CORE, a proud monolith in a lake of fire, monument to the greatest minds of the Underground. You found him there like you knew you would, standing stiffly, shoulders squared, eyes on the rocky cliffs and plateaus of Hotland.

Without a word, you came into the observation deck from the hallway and shut the door behind you. You took a step forward when you heard the click of a lock sliding into place and turned back, seeing a hand at the door for only a moment before it vanished. Still, he didn’t speak and he didn’t move. He waited for you to come to him.

You were shaking. You clutched your chest, feeling your heart pounding, and it seemed so loud and frantic that you thought he must be able to hear it.

“We must have met before this,” he said suddenly. “I suppose that’s why we became so attached to each other so quickly. There was a certain familiarity that made us both feel at ease.”

You didn’t know what he was talking about. Your whole body was throbbing and your thoughts were racing and the only thing on your mind was him, how nice it was to be near him, how good his hands felt with even the briefest, most innocent of touches.

“I can promise you that you’re in no danger. The feeling will fade over time. It’s affecting you much more strongly because of your biology. It’s not simply your soul, but your body and your nervous system that are simultaneously bearing the brunt of our frequencies synchronizing....”

He was trying to explain but you couldn’t focus. You said his name—

(and this is how it went, really, not like in the dream where it all falls apart)

and he took you by the shoulders, pinning you between him and the window of the observation deck, your head knocking back against the glass and making your vision swim. “Say it again,” he hissed eagerly, and the words came out low and threatening and sank deep into the pit of your stomach, stirring both fear and wanting.

“G-Ghhg....” You choked on it when he started to touch you, more hands than you could count or keep track of roaming your body.

“Again,” he demanded, the fingers at your hip digging into your skin hard enough to leave a bruise. He was undressing you, and the cold air in the room hit your skin and made goosebumps rise along your arms. You tugged at his lab coat in an unspoken plea not to leave you the only one exposed but it was the only thing he took off, letting it fall to the floor in a crumpled heap behind him.

“{ }!” you cried, sounds you can no longer remember in sequence. He lifted you off the ground with a hand on either side of you, sliding along your rib cage, another scratching lightly at your spine, more grasping your hips and urging you to wrap your legs around his waist.

It was only then that he suddenly seemed to remember himself, stopping everything, holding you carefully, studying your expression. “Are you sure?” he asked, sounding hoarse and uneasy, like it was taking all of his willpower to speak.

You draped your arms around him, pulling him closer, holding on tightly, resting your forehead against his chest and taking deep breaths. You were sure. You wanted this. You didn’t know why, and that should have scared you, but it felt familiar, it felt like coming home.

(He was _familiar_ to you when nothing else was.)

“Please,” you said, unable to get another word out when you felt him move his hips, his pelvis grinding against yours, and there was _something_ there, warm and throbbing and big enough to make you swallow nervously.

“This might be uncomfortable,” he murmured, his grip on every part of you tightening, fingers digging into your thighs as he opened your legs wider and continued to rock his hips against you infuriatingly slowly. “I’ve never been intimate with a human before.”

You didn’t care, you assured him you didn’t care, used what little air you could get into your lungs to beg him to please, please, _do something_. Another hand appeared and slid down the center of your chest, palm pressing into the sensitive flesh between your legs. You threw your head back and chased the friction with your hips, barely cognizant of the way he let out a shuddering sigh in response.

“{ },” you sighed, felt a shiver rip through him, wanted him more than you wanted to breathe. “{ }, please, I want you inside me—!”

He didn't make you wait any longer, two hands pulling you down onto something wholly unrecognizable. It was thick and engorged and filled with a strange, pleasant heat, smooth and almost gel-like in texture, squeezing inside of you with ease and stretching once past the clenching muscles at your entrance.

You clung to him desperately because you didn’t know what else to do. It was unlike anything you’d ever felt before, utterly alien, almost frightening. You whimpered and raked your nails down his back, wishing he wasn't wearing anything at all so you could feel his body.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, mouth pressing to your brow comfortingly. “Do you want to stop?”

“No.” You were sure of this. You still wanted him. _You’d done this before._ You shifted in his hands, rotating your hips, taking him deeper into your body, and the movement drew a gasp from both of you. It _moved_ , squirmed inside of you, brushing against something that stole your breath and made you seize up, arching your back into him. “Please, please do that again,” you begged, “please, I just, I need....”

He watched you in awe, eyes filling with wonder at every sound you made. He started moving, withdrawing ever so slightly, the appendage sliding out of you easily, and then pushing back inside, a little harder, a little faster. It writhed inside of you independent of his movements, twisting and coiling, its girth constantly shifting from a tapering form to a constant thickness throughout.

You were seeing stars. He found a rhythm that pleased both of you, smothering your body against the glass and thrusting up into you, and his member eased deeper, _deeper_ until you were sure there was no further it could go and yet it did. Your toes curled and your fingers dug into him and you couldn’t bite down your cries if you wanted to, moans echoing throughout the observation deck, reverberating off of the glass.

He said your name, his face buried in the crook of your neck. He was reaching his end, hips stammering, and he was apologizing, stuttering that it was out of line, terribly out of line, not at all his intention but you were just so perfect that he couldn’t stop, babbling against your ear a litany of sweet nothings, “love you, I love you, oh, it’s been so long,” and—

*

You wake, sweat-soaked sheets tangled around your legs, heart pounding in your chest. Arousal throbs between your legs, aches with an urgent burning that calls for the touch of someone in particular. Someone who no longer is.

You take deep breaths, an arm across your eyes to block out the shadows shifting on the other side of your eyelids, stretching along the walls. There’s a soft, barely-there sound of him dripping, waiting for you to call his name, to bring him back into being even if only in your eyes.

You mouth silent apologies and feel the cold absence of him beside you.


	5. Pareidolia Play

“Alphys?” 

You stepped out of the elevator hesitantly, clipboard clutched to your chest. You didn’t like it in the basement labs. { } insisted on keeping the lights dimmed so more power could be concentrated on regulating the temperature, a necessary sacrifice for the sensitive equipment he preferred to keep down there. 

Reluctantly, you started down the hall, calling Alphys’ name at every doorway. The electronic screens mounted on the walls lit up as you approached, prompting for text input to log experiment data. Automatic doors opened and shut, sliding across dark rooms devoid of occupants. The hallways, too, were empty, the basement lab strictly off limits to all but essential personnel at { }’s request. No guards, no visitors, not even royalty came down here except under special circumstances. It was just the four of you.

And yet you couldn’t shake the feeling that something else was watching from somewhere you couldn’t see. 

“Alphys?” you called, a little desperately, a slight tremor in your voice. You heard footsteps somewhere up ahead, the whisper of a door sliding open. You froze, uncertain.

“H-hello?” came the shy, lilting voice of your fellow lab assistant, and you let out the breath you’d been holding, walking hurriedly down the hall. She looked almost as relieved as you when you came around the corner, smiling weakly.

(“Don’t tell him, p-please,” she confided in you once, “b-but something just feels wrong about that place.”)

“How’s it going down here?” 

“Oh. F-fine,” she said, gesturing for you to follow her into the room she’d stepped out of. She had a series of calculations scrawled across the board, barrier dimensions multiplied by an estimated determination value. “Taking a look at the, um. The, uh, J-Jabberwocky Problem, I think he called it.” She adjusted her glasses as they started to slide down her snout. “D-does this sound right to you? I checked it, d-double and triple checked, but, um. Thought I’d ask. It c-comes out to a really big number.” 

Somewhere in the duodecillions, in fact. You frowned, reading over her work carefully. “Jeez, yeah, it does. Everything looks right, though.” 

“Oh. Great.” Alphys looked at the floor. “W-well, not great, actually. Th-the opposite of great. Because, uh, that’s the force that we need to match or e-exceed to even have a chance at breaking the barrier.” 

“Oh.” You lapsed into silence for a time. Alphys pressed a hand to her temple, as though massaging a headache. “Look, we’ll figure it out,” you promised her. “We’ve gotten this far, haven’t we?”

She cracked a weak, uneasy smile. “W-well, I guess. Crunch the numbers now and worry later, r-right?” She sighed. “Sans is working out the best material to use for this thing. I-I think he settled on a rigid, synthesized compound, something resembling monster bone. Makes sense, I guess. It’s a good conduit for magic.” 

“Speaking of Sans,” you glanced down at the clipboard, “have you seen him around?”

“Oh, he should be back soon,” Alphys said. “The doctor had him go get some rock samples from the area near the barrier.” 

You frown. “I thought we already samples.”

“S-so did I. I-I thought we already knew the effect of the persistent determination value on the barrier, too.” She smiled nervously, shrugged, and changed the subject. “B-but, um, why do you ask?”

You sighed, holding up the clipboard, an alphabet written across the top of the paper and lines of numbers descending from each letter. “Another cipher puzzle. It’s homophonic substitution this time, so I had to go check the pressure levels for all of the CORE’s upper valves going counterclockwise from the door to get the key, which I  _ then _ had to painstakingly apply to the encoded message only to discover I need another keyword for the last part.”

You’d decoded and written  **ASK SANS FOR CLUE** at the bottom, circled, underlined, and covered it in enraged question marks and exclamation points. 

“That seems,” Alphys paused, looking for a gentle word. “Um, elaborate.”

You sighed heavily. “That’s one word for it, I guess. I left him a simple ‘how’re you doing’ note over the lunch break and he’s making me jump through hoops just to see the response. I wonder if something’s wrong. It almost seems like he’s getting paranoid.”

“Who’s paranoid?” Sans asked.

You don’t know whether you or Alphys made a more embarrassing sound, spinning around wide-eyed to where nobody had been standing before. Sans blinked and waved innocently. 

“God, Sans, would you stop that!” you scolded him, heartbeat racing. 

“Sorry, kid, it’s a long way between here and Waterfall.” He shrugged, looking a little apologetic, but he sounded more amused than anything. “You know I’m too lazy to walk.” 

“At least knock or something so we know you’re there!”

Sans looked right past you at the chalkboard, grin slowly fading into something more subdued and uncomfortable. “You working out barrier variables?”

“D-Dr. { } asked me to look over his calculations,” Alphys said.

“Huh. So we both got busywork.” 

“There’s nothing wrong with double-checking,” you said, feeling you had to step in and speak in { }’s defense. “There’s no room for error here, we can’t afford to make any mistakes or we’d be risking the lives of everyone in the Underground.” 

Alphys looked away sheepishly, as though embarrassed, but Sans turned to you, head cocked to the side almost challengingly. “What’s he got you doing, then?” 

“Looking for you.” Exasperated, you show him your clipboard. “I guess you’ve got the next part of this cipher?”

Sans studies your handwriting, gaze wordlessly flicking from the page to your face and back down again. “This is ridiculous,” he muttered, turning on his heel and heading for the door. “I’m gonna talk to him.”

“Wait, Sans.” You stumbled after him, trying to catch his sleeve. “You can’t just interrupt—!”

“Yeah, I can,” he said, pushing your hand off of him with more force than was at all necessary. “He’s not infallible, alright? He’s not perfect. He makes bad calls, and this—jerking us all around like this—is one of them. Even if you don’t wanna admit it.” 

You started to argue, insisting before you even had a counter completely thought out that he wasn’t jerking you around, that this was all still important somehow, had to be, even if you couldn’t see how yet, but Sans had already vanished, blinking out of the room soundlessly with only wavering hints of magic lingering in the air like sparks in his wake.

A painful silence hung over the room, scornful and mocking of the sudden tension that had sprung up between the three of you. Things had been different the last couple weeks. Sans was nervous, speaking in hushed tones, looking around to make sure nobody was listening. Alphys was doing some research of her own on the side, notes she wouldn’t let anybody else look at.

{ } had changed, too. You think it started with him. He’d gotten anxious, every little thing setting him off, and then he started isolating himself and sending you all on errands.

Everyone was keeping secrets and you hated it.

“What happened to us?” you asked, more to yourself than anything, but Alphys heard your mutter and nervously twiddled her thumbs.

“M-maybe you should talk to him instead of Sans.” She flinched when you turned to her, a brow raised questioningly. “I-I-I mean, I just think...you know, m-maybe it would go over better. H-he’s different with you.”

“What do you mean?”

“W-well...” Alphys turned away from you, facing the blackboard. “I really shouldn’t gossip. But we’re all a little...um, i-intimidated by him.” The pause was too long; you knew she wanted to use a different word, something stronger.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” you said, unsure of who you were trying to reassure. “He’s fine. Ambitious, yeah, but he’s always been considerate of us. He’d never do anything to hurt anybody.”

You wanted her to agree. You wanted, more than anything, to see her nod and smile and for everything to go back to normal. You wanted to be told the creeping dread rising from the pit of your stomach had no place there.

Alphys turned only halfway, eyeing you over the frames of her glasses. She looked wary of you. Briefly, her gaze shifted, looking past you. Trying to see if anything was behind you. “The doctor,” she said quietly, “is the kind of person who will do  _ anything _ to get what he wants.”

*

“Taking your sweet time with that,” Sans says, unsolicited commentary that earns him a sharp glance.

You run into him and the human child—Frisk, you overhear while the two are across the room—at the Mt. Ebott Antique Literature and Coffee Shop, sipping something sweet and warm in a white porcelain mug while solving the cipher from the magico-algebra lab. Frisk sees you first and waves cheerfully, trotting over with Sans close behind.

You want to say something like, “funny seeing you here,” but it probably isn’t a coincidence. Nothing is anymore.

They join you at the table, Frisk plopping down in the empty seat across from you and Sans taking the open chair on your right. He leans over to look at your notebook, which is when he decides to be obnoxious, jabbing the bony tip of his finger into your side and telling you not to be so  _ cold and calculating _ . 

“Does it matter how quickly I solve it?” you ask, the question coming out deadpan but you’re suddenly struck with worry. Is that the kind of thing he’d do? Some sort of time-sensitive code?

(No. He wouldn’t. No time. There is no time. Not where he is. Not where you’ve been.)

“Nah. But I’m kinda curious what it says, too.” Sans rests an elbow on the table and leans his head in his skeletal palm, looking bored. “Actually, maybe you can help me out. The kids finished their little treasure hunt and they want another one, but the well’s  _ bone  _ dry. I’ve got nothing.” 

“Use one of these,” you say absently, tapping your pen on the grid drawn at the top of the page, an alphabet scrawled across the top and down the left side. “A Vigenère. You encode it with a keyword or phrase, lay that over the original letters, then see where the letter combination matches on the chart.”

This one is almost too easy. He gave you the keyword to begin with—“whence our insurmountable beast sprang forth,” the source of the Jabberwock being the poem itself,  _ Jabberwocky _ —so all you had to do is put the phrases next to each other and check the letters with the chart you made.

**J L J  D I  N  D C H O J U  P  B H  I  J   E  L V I  R  F O**

**J A B B E R W O C K Y  J  A  B B  E R  W O C K Y  J   A**

“Gonna need something harder,” he says, glancing across the table. Frisk smiles back innocently. “They’re getting pretty good at this.”

“Use a homophonic cipher with numbers,” you suggest. “Just like he used to do.”

Sans pauses, taps his fingers on the bar and making a distractingly loud clicking sound. You look at him in annoyance but find his expression worried, eyes averted, grin more subdued. “Remembering more, huh?”

“Yeah.” Remembering isn’t the right word for it. It doesn’t feel like recalling anything, it feels like getting lost, like finding yourself on a dark road you don’t recognize or getting swept out to sea, and you’re scared to go further but you know you don’t have any other choice. “They last a lot longer,” you mention. “I’ll be in the middle of doing something, and something will remind me of it, and I just...I lose time. I look at the clock and it’s been an hour and it feels wrong.”

The lights of Sans’ eyes glow softly in both sympathy and concern. “Wrong how?”

“Wrong like,” you struggle to put it into words now. “I dunno. Just wrong. Time is weird for me.”

You line up the last letters, tracing the row down until you have a match, completing the message:

**ALICE WHO FELL PAGE SIXTY TWO**

“I don’t want to alarm you,” { } says,

(says? He’s saying it now? That can’t be right, he can’t be here and you can’t be there, and yet you feel that comforting sensation of his hand on your shoulder, hear him speaking low and secretive beside your ear. 

Is this happening now? Is it happening hundreds of years ago? How many times have you done this before?

_ How many more times will he make you do it? _ )

“but I believe the extra precaution is necessary from now on. Our messages should have, at minimum, two steps, preferably with two different encryption methods.”

You (right now? Back then? You don’t know, you can’t tell, but it does feel warmer suddenly, like sweltering geothermal heat clogging the air) look up at him, worry marring your face. “Why? Is something going on?”

“Something is always going on,” he says tiredly. “It’s in our best interest to exercise caution.”

“Kid?” Sans asks. Not in a lab coat, but a blue jacket, sitting in a bookstore. You’re sitting in a bookstore. { } isn’t there, isn’t standing behind you checking your work. You look back just to make sure. Sans’ gaze flicks back behind you like he needs to check, too. 

“I need,” you take a deep breath, swallow a lump building in your throat, try to reassure yourself of when and where you are, “a minute.”

“Sure.” He glances down at your notebook. “Looks like another goose chase.”

You nod. “This is definitely referring to  _ Alice in Wonderland _ , but it’s not very helpful otherwise. I don’t even know how many copies are in town.”

“Well, all we can do is start looking. I’ll go thumb through what they’ve got in stock here.” Sans gets out of his seat. You stop him, reaching across the table to tug at his sleeve.

“Sans,” you say quietly. “Thank you.”

He shrugs, but his smile looks almost embarrassed. “Hey, no big deal. Like I said, I owe you. Least I can do is help out.” His attention shifts to Frisk, who’s been sitting patiently and silently the whole time, swinging their legs and staring boredly at the shelves. “Sorry, kiddo, I’ll get a new code for you here soon. Gotta do this first, though.” The child nods in understanding. You do little more than blink and Sans disappears.

You sit in silence for only a few moments before Frisk signs something. “Oh, uh.” You frown. “I’m sorry, I don’t...”

They tap on your notebook, looking pointedly at your pen. You smile and pass it across the table, watching as they quickly write a message for you in a cute, childish scrawl.

**Sans told me you want to go to Hotland. Do you have friends who live there?**

“Oh. Well.” 

Frisk tilts their head curiously at your indecision. It really shouldn’t be a hard question to answer.

“Not exactly,” you say. “I mean, I had a friend there, but he’s...well, he isn’t there anymore, but it’s the last place I saw him.” 

Frisk smiles brightly.  **That makes sense!** they write.  **Sans said it had something to do with** ~~**kwontum**    **kw**~~ **some kind of science stuff. I don’t understand all of it but I think I know what he’s talking about. It’s like,** Frisk pauses, taps the pen against their chin thoughtfully,  **a loop. Like a movie you have to rewind over and over, but you can change what happens if you play it right.**

You stare down at the words in shock, then at Frisk’s face. “How do you know that?”

**I can do it, too. I can reset and start over if I mess up. It can be good if things are wrong, but it’s a bad power otherwise. Sans said it’s a mean thing to do, because it affects lots of people, not just me. So I don’t use it anymore.** Frisk offers a reassuring smile.  **So you can do it, too? It’s okay if you’ve used it. You’re a nice person, so I bet you did it for good reasons.**

“No, I don’t think....” 

_ plip plip plip _

You go rigid in your seat, eyes darting around the room. You didn’t imagine it, you’re sure. You heard it. You heard something dripping. Maybe it’s one of the drink dispensers at the cafe counter. You tell yourself that must be it (but it didn’t sound like that, it wasn’t loud but it made everything else quiet, it was far away but you heard it on the inside of your head, against your eardrums, felt it with your whole body).

Frisk looks confused, waiting for you to finish. You clear your throat and try to remember what you were talking about. You can still hear it. 

“I don’t think,”  _ plip _ “that it’s quite the same,”  _ plip plip plip plip  _ “but maybe it’s similar. The looping-rewinding thing, that sounds familiar. I feel like that might’ve happened, I just don’t remember.”

_ plip plip plip _

(You’re  _ afraid _ and you don’t know why. You’re terrified, your body’s tense and primed for fight-or-flight, thoughts racing, heart pounding, sweat running down your neck, like you’ve done this, you’ve done this before, like you know what’s coming and know to be afraid but you don’t, you don’t know and you hate it.)

Frisk thinks it over before their eyes light up and they scribble something else down.  **Oh! Maybe he’s doing it instead!**

(Why, why are you so afraid, why do you feel like your life is in danger, like the walls are closing in like a thousand hands are reaching for you all at once to pull you apart in every direction)

“Who?” you say hoarsely but you know, you already know. 

**The guy you’re always with.**

It’s hot, it’s unbearably, suffocatingly hot like the bowels of the CORE and the cliffs of Hotland and failure, catastrophic alarm bells ringing failure warning you of an imminent disaster, heat that seeps through your clothes and your skin and your bones and chokes your soul. The dripping is louder. 

**He knows how to sign! When he was on the bus, he told me to pretend he wasn’t there,** Frisk goes on,  **but he’s standing right behind you today, so maybe he wants to be noticed this time.**

(“Does it bother you when I stand this close?” he asked, leaning over your shoulder to look at the notes you were taking. “I don’t want to be intrusive.”

“No, I like being close to you,” you said, smiled, even, why did you smile, why did you feel safe then,  what happened? )

“Right behind me?” you repeat, trying to sound lighthearted, unconcerned. He shouldn’t be there. He shouldn’t be, you thought there were rules to this, that he could only come at night when you were alone.

It’s just like him to make you think you had the answer, to lead you to a faulty conclusion for the sake of a thought experiment, or just to prove a point. 

Very slowly, very hesitantly, you turn around. 

You think your heart stops.

The lights in the store flicker—and that’s real, that really happens, because other people glance up in mild confusion before going back to what they were doing. You see a shadow first, spreading along the floor from the table, from your chair (from you), elongating itself along the wall into the shape of him, tall and looming, dripping void. 

A face you’ve only seen between stages of consciousness, in nightmares and fever dreams, shrouded in darkness, suddenly appears, breaches the rippling surface of void that surrounds him, a haunting, fractured smile frozen in place.

You can’t find your voice. You can’t think of any words. You’re on your feet because you feel like you have to run but you’re frozen, unable to move. The room is getting darker, quieter, colder, the heat is subsiding and a frightening numbness fills the space. He speaks—

(the sound is jarring, a computer fan whirring, a busy signal, a broken fax machine, if all those things were organic creatures and those sounds were their death cries)

and you can’t understand any of it, but you feel desperation and grief. Your phone vibrates on the table, short bursts of dull, buzzing noise, a dozen messages in just a couple seconds, but these messages are lost somewhere in the void before they reach you, glitched symbols overlapping, crisscrossing vertical and horizontal lines of nonsense until the screen is consumed by darkness.

“What do you want?” you ask him in a frightened whisper. “What do you want from me?”

_ “Please.” _

You’re startled to suddenly understand something, but you do, there’s a voice in all of that noise and it finally reaches you.

_ “Please. I need. Please.”  _

“What? What do you need?” 

You feel hands grip your shoulders and legs, tugging you forward fast and hard enough that you think you’ll fall, but you never come into contact with anything and you just keep falling, the store lights extinguished by darkness. You feel more hands, holding you steady, squeezing you in reassurance, taking you somewhere. You feel his voice—you don’t hear it, but sense it, a vibration of the soul.

**_“I need to feel you again.”_ **

You shiver at the sensation of him encompassing you, of the void closing in, wrapping around your body, stroking your skin. “Wait,” you don’t like this, “wait, don’t—!”

**_“My soul is a c h i n g.”_ ** The words flow into you like liquid, fill your head, flood your chest, wrap around your soul in a way that’s dizzying and uncomfortable. A hand presses flat against your chest with a painful pressure and seeps  _ into  _ you, straight through, beneath your flesh,  _ touches  _ and makes you gasp. 

“W-wait,” you stammer, “wait, please, it’s too much.” 

**_“It isn’t enough.”_ ** Hands cup your face, turn your gaze up like always. He wants you to look at him. Like Sans, there are deep hollows in his face, holes where eyes should be, but there’s no light there, nothing but a bottomless void, and your stomach turns at the sight of it.  **_“You don’t remember how you yearned for me. How the softest touch made you mad with desire. Your soul throbbed with wanting and I heard its whispers.”_ **

You feel him, feel him everywhere, all around you, inside of you, inside the inside of you, in places you didn’t know you had, places you can’t touch, ebbing and flowing and twisting just the right way that you struggle to breathe and see stars. You don’t know that it feels good but you  _ feel  _ it with every bone in your body.

**_“I would have given you everything.”_ **

That’s when it happens, when something clamps down on your soul and  _ pulls _ , ripping him out of you and you out of him, dragging you out of the dark and into the light, your body slamming on the ground, knocking the wind out of you. 

You’re hyperventilating, sucking in air desperately because you suddenly feel as though you’ve been holding your breath for far too long, a cold sweat slicking your skin. “Easy,” Sans says, helping you sit up with a hand on your back. One of his eyes glows bright, electric blue, and you feel the faint tingling of magic in the bones of his hand. “Deep breaths.”

“What happened?” you look around blearily. It’s the bookstore. Frisk is kneeling next to you, clutching your sleeve with a worried tremble in their hands. 

“Nothing,” Sans says in that firm, hurried tone that tells you he’s just as scared as you are. “Didn’t let anything happen. Got you out in time.” His tone is almost pleading, reaching for confirmation. He wants to hear it, wants to know you’re okay. You press a hand to your chest

(where he was, where he touched, where he went inside)

and breathe. 

“I’m okay,” you say. “I’m alright. I’m okay.”

Sans isn’t smiling, and you feel his magic wrapped heavily around your soul, clutching tightly, afraid to let go. He knows you’re lying. 

“Can you tell me something?”

He helps you to your feet wordlessly and gives a reluctant nod.

“What was he like?” You look back again to make sure he isn’t there. Would you even notice if he was? “Was he...was he a good person? A good monster, whatever, just—!”

“Don’t ask me that.” Sans has your notebook and pen but he doesn't give them to your right away, staring down towards your chest. You realize you have an old, weathered copy of  _ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland _ in your arms. You have no idea how you got it . “Please don’t ask me that. You know better.” 

_ He might be listening. _

(It’s wrong, everything is wrong, it feels like you’re living in the wrong place and the wrong time, like you shouldn’t be here, like this is the dream and the dreams are where you should be. It’s not like remembering, it’s like getting lost.

You have no choice but to keep going and hope you come out on the other side.)

*

“Keep your temper,” says the Caterpillar at the top of page sixty-two, and further down, you see eerily familiar handwriting snaking down the outer margins, letters descending vertically;

**P**

**L**

**A**

**Y**

**F**

**A**

**I**

**R**

**M**

**Y**

**D**

**E**

**A**

**R**

It’s well past midnight, the house dark and silent save for your cell phone screen lighting the pages of the book sprawled out on the sheets in front of you. 

You want to focus but there’s a distracting feeling welling up inside of you, and you embarrassingly recognize it as arousal but so much worse, more powerful, more consuming.

It’s been building for hours, ever since you came home from the bookstore, from a minor annoyance to something impossible to ignore, a heat, a burning want, a throbbing deep in your chest that goes deeper than your heart.

(He did this to you, you know he did, he touched you and that’s when it started. He knew this would happen.)

You roll onto your side, biting your lip as you trail one hand down to the front of your body, touching yourself over your clothes. It’s worse, like scratching all around an itch without actually satisfying it, makes the pulsing of your soul stronger, the heat unbearable. You think of him

(touching you, touching inside like he did before and you want that, you want that again even though it scared you, want more, want his fingers wrapped around your soul, sliding along its shimmering surface, dipping  _ inside, _ and you would open for him, your soul would yield and let him in and you would feel  _ everything _ )

and your body is wracked by a stabbing spike of pleasure-pain, laced together, indistinguishable, not at all enough. You inhale shakily as you slip your hand into your underwear, feel yourself hot and slick with need, stroke your fingers over your sensitive flesh, whimpering and keening. 

(and he would touch you outside, too, he always would, he was considerate of your body’s desires as well as your soul’s, you can imagine it,  you can think of your hand as his, can think of the ways you want him touching you, just like this, slowly first, drag your fingers down the middle like  that, wet them in the dampness gathering between your legs so it’s not so dry and then rougher, a little harder, palm flat against it, working you to completion)

“G...” You swallow hard, bucking your hips against your own hand. You moan and you gasp and you make small noises despite your best efforts to keep your voice in. Something is trying to come out of you, a word, a name. “Ga-ahhhhh....”

(he would be everything you’ve ever wanted and more, he would touch you like this but  _ better _ , so much better, he would smooth his hand along your thigh, hold your hip steady, caress your chest and your cheek and your lips, he wo **ul** **d give y** **ou everything if only you would l _et him, dearest, most precious companion._**

Fear seizes you, builds in your lungs and traps your voice in your throat. Your eyes fly open and you don’t see him, scanning the room carefully, drawing yourself inward self-consciously.

**_No. Let me see you._ **

“Oh god,” you whisper because the burning still hasn’t stopped, you’re afraid but you’re still painfully turned on, his voice is doing things to you, making your heart race and your soul vibrate and every inch of you prickle with need.

**_Yes_ ** , he purrs from somewhere unseen,  **_you need me._ **

You don’t know if this is real. You don’t know if you’re just imagining this, if your soul is that desperate that you’re conjuring him from memory, but why this one,  _ why the one that you’re afraid of? _ You’re still writhing, hand still between your legs, and your face burns with shame. 

**_Show me._ **

You do. You don’t want to ( **_you do, my dear_ ** ) but you lay on your back with your face flushed and your chest fluttering with panicked breaths, letting him see everything. He makes a low, pleased sound, an exhale thick with desire, and your back arches and a whimper escapes you from nothing more than the noise.

**_Dear one, I could do so much more than speak to you,_ ** he says, his voice suddenly closer, a presence draping itself over you with the eerie weightlessness of a cobweb. **_You need only speak my name._ **

“I-I don’t know it,” you stammer. You can almost see him. You can almost see a face in the dark above you, and it’s worse now, you want to reach out and touch him but you know you’d feel nothing.

**_You do._ ** You feel the air stirring, his hands moving through the void, trying to touch you. A phantom touch on your wrist, trailing along the inside of your thigh.  **_Don’t think. Heed your soul’s desires. You need me._ **

“Gast—!”

Someone screams.

Your eyes widen and you stumble, tripping and falling in something cold and damp. You feel hands on you (not his, and you’re both disappointed and relieved), pulling you upright. You smell wet earth. You clutch rain-dampened grass between your fingers. You’re still in your pajamas, but you’re in the front lawn of your parents’ house.

“Hey,” your father’s hands hold your shoulders firmly as he crouches down and looks you in the eye. “Are you alright? Are you awake now?”

“Awake?” you repeat in confusion.

Your mother stands behind him, shaking, a hand clutched over her mouth as she tries not to cry.

“It’s alright,” your father tells her, “it’s alright, they’re okay. Just sleepwalking.”

“Sleepwalking?”

He offers a hand and you take it, letting him pull you to your feet. “You really scared us,” he says quietly. “You wouldn’t answer when we called your name. Nearly punched me when I tried to get you back inside.” 

“I thought,” your mother chokes on a sob. “I thought you were going to leave.” 

A dream. It was just a dream. You can’t even remember when you fell asleep, when you stopped reading the book. It happened so seamlessly it doesn’t seem real. 

You stare up at the house, looking reluctantly to your bedroom window. 

He’s there. His face looms between the curtains, leering down at you. You remember what Frisk told you before, describing him as the guy you’re always with. You wonder how long he’s been following you, how long he’s been there, just out of sight, watching your every move, if it started recently when you started working on the ciphers or when you were rescued from the Underground, or maybe

( **_you’re getting warmer, dear_ ** )

even earlier.


End file.
